When marketing and sales operate in silos, it leads to a lot of frustration, fewer qualified leads, lower revenue, and dissatisfied customers. That's why we're offering 5 practical tips to improve that collaboration.
1) Make clear and specific agreements
Make sure you're all on the same page and clearly agree on the following:
- When is a lead? Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL), and when Sales Qualified (SQL)?
- When does the marketing team hand off a lead to the sales team?
- Within what time frame must a Sales-Qualified Lead be followed up on?
- Who are the buyer personas? Who are the buyers? What are their needs and wants?
- What does the ideal customer look like?
- What does the buyer's journey What's the process? What path does a (potential) customer take before making a purchase?
Reach joint and specific agreements on goals, definitions, and priorities reduces frustration and confusion. Accusations that the sales team isn't following up on leads properly and that the marketing team has no idea what the customer wants will be less common.
2) Keep each other constantly updated on the results
Communicate constantly with each other about the results achieved.
To do this, use a shared dashboard with metrics (daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly) on the following:
- Number of Marketing-Qualified Leads
- Number of Sales-Qualified Leads
- Percentage of Marketing-Qualified Leads that have become Sales-Qualified Leads
- Percentage of Sales-Qualified Leads who became customers
Check these out together:
- Which marketing campaigns generated the most Marketing Qualified Leads?
- Which marketing campaigns generated the highest conversion rate to Sales Qualified Leads?
- What digital content is viewed the most?
3) Create valuable content together
Content Marketing is a commonly used marketing tactic to improve lead generation. It's all about creating and sharing valuable and relevant content.
Sales can be a huge help to marketing in this regard by sharing customers’ problems, challenges, questions, requests, and feedback. What kinds of questions do prospects ask? What challenges do customers face? etc.
Conversely, it’s inspiring for a marketer to regularly accompany sales representatives on client visits or sit in on sales calls.
Join forces and work together to create compelling e-books, blog posts, checklists, customer stories, webinars, and more. . Always make sure to agree to communicate using the same corporate identity, tone of voice, and writing style. This conveys confidence and professionalism.
4) Use lead nurturing and marketing automation
Delivering the right message at the right time—that is the essence of lead nurturing. “Nurture” your leads with the right information and, step by step, convince them that your product or service is the best solution.
Work together to come up with the best lead nurturing scenarios and templates. Select your best emails, blog posts, e-books, videos, and other relevant content that align with each stage of your target audience’s customer journey.
With a marketing automation tool, such as ClickDimensions and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can deliver all selected content at the right time and in a fully automated manner. This not only eliminates manual work, but marketing automation tools also track all interactions and show which information is effective in capturing the attention of prospects.
5) Implement CRM software to facilitate collaboration
A CRM tool serves as an important bridge between the sales and marketing departments. If your organization is a CRM solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 If you implement it, you'll always have access to the same, most up-to-date customer data. This makes collaboration easier.
Based on all the customer data in the CRM, you can more easily identify target audiences (segmentation) and launch marketing campaigns tailored to the different target audiences.
If the marketing team then supplements the customer data in the CRM with as much marketing data as possible, the sales team will gain a better understanding of which customers and prospects are being reached by specific campaigns and what results they yield.
Even more powerful is the Integration of CRM with marketing automation. This will give you insight into a lead’s complete history, ranging from the website pages they’ve visited and the web forms they’ve filled out to information about the emails they’ve opened. Everything is recorded in a single system, and useful information is not lost.
Conclusion
‘Closing the gap,’ ‘Marketing and sales alignment,’ ‘Smarketing,’ … these are all terms that mean the same thing: breaking down the traditional divide between marketing and sales and increasing collaboration between the two departments.
Marketing and sales ultimately share the same goal: to generate (new) satisfied customers and increase revenue. Only when both departments work together will they be able to achieve this goal more successfully.
