he era when sales and marketing worked independently has come to an end for one simple reason: Prospects have changed. Today, your leads are everything. Their behavior, buying journey, and lifecycle should be 100% aligned with marketing and sales efforts.
Even if it takes nine months and a great effort to educate them is the only way to truly offer them a remarkable experience and triple your conversion rate . Here are six steps on how you can start working on aligning your sales and marketing team this afternoon.
1. Hold them accountable for revenue goals
Forget the 80s mentality where marketing generated leads and sales closed them. Today, your sales and marketing team should focus solely on meeting your revenue goals.
This means that sales and marketing must work together
Special Data on their tactics to generate better , higher quality leads , even if that means fewer leads . Sales needs to follow the journey and provide feedback on what attracts leads and work more scientifically to lean on what works and stop doing what doesn't.
Marketing needs sales to be a direct channel and also a feedback channel. You need to know what questions prospects are asking, what content they are excited to get, what content within the marketing strategy they need to tell a specific story, and where in the sales process customers get nervous.
Remember insecurity kills closing, the more confident prospects feel, the faster and more frequent deals will be made.
2. Revenue-Based Marketing
Revenue-based marketing , if it fits your business, is the perfect way to keep marketing and sales in the same room, working on the same deliverable and aligned to the same numbers.
As you begin to strategize your revenue-based marketing program, you'll need your marketing and sales teams to work on profile development. How to define your ideal consumer or buyer persona ? What about demographic and psychographic data?
This way you prepare them from the beginning to work together and they will have many opportunities to continue working together if you get the alignment right.
3. CRO for sales and marketing
Let go of the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales, and replace them with a single Chief Revenue Officer or CRO . It doesn't matter if you have sales or marketing experience. You want a person responsible for achieving the company's revenue.
Make sure you have someone overseeing all marketing in an orchestrated way and the entire sales process in the same way.
Ultimately, you want to create a seamless click-to-close experience for leads that begins when they arrive on your website (marketing) and ends when they sign contracts (sales). Having a person supervising this entire experience makes it much easier to build a strategic buyer journey for the sale, learn its importance here.
4. Join funnel metrics
Few companies understand why their funnel metrics go up and down. To start, implement the 5 basic elements of an effective sales funnel.
What is your conversion rate from marketing qualified leads ( MQL ) to new customers? What is your lead conversion rate? It is generally easier to track. What is your conversion rate from website visits to new customers? This is usually much harder to track.
You want to know your monthly conversion rates at each stage of the funnel. Have the data on a dashboard and review it weekly. You also want your revenue team focused on improving those conversion metrics and showing monthly improvements. Discover 5 fundamental metrics for content marketing.
Very often we see these kinds of problems in a customer's funnel. You can have huge amounts of MQLs that rarely convert into sales opportunities, or sales opportunities that never convert into new customers or revenue. It is best to create a comprehensive marketing and sales funnel.
Identify those weak points in your funnel and start working on them.