Supercharge Your Growth with Sales & Marketing Alignment eGuide

What if

Do you ever feel as though your sales and marketing teams resemble opposing sides in a football match, rather than teammates?

Everyone is pursuing the same goals – qualified leads and conversions to sales – yet the two teams deploy completely different strategies and tactics to achieve these.

What this means is that your sales and marketing teams are working in silo. They’re not sharing insights or collaborating to drive the best quality leads.

The hurdle

Your marketing team’s activity drives a high volume of leads that are passed over to sales.

However, they’re all unqualified, which means that the suitability of the leads hasn’t been assessed before they’re passed over to sales. This means your sales team has no way of knowing which leads to prioritise. They’ll likely waste valuable resources trying to find the few precious needles hidden in the haystack.

Alternatively, sales will discount the marketing leads altogether in favour of fewer, higher quality leads they generate themselves.

This shows that there’s a huge data disconnect between your marketing and sales teams, which is a common occurrence in many businesses. As high as 90% of sales and marketing professionals point to multiple disconnects across strategy, process, content, and culture (LinkedIn, 2020).

Without established lead management processes and workflows, the problems for your sales and marketing teams will continue.

Imagine your marketing and sales teams worked in partnership, acknowledging that closing a sale is a shared responsibility. Everyone would work towards the end goal of getting higher quality leads to enable high-profit sales at an increased rate.

This is known as sales and marketing alignment, an approach that allows you to accelerate performance across both teams, resulting in 38% higher sales win rates (MarketingProfs).

If sales shared their in-depth customer knowledge, marketing could base their strategy around it. You’d find that marketing would do a better job of raising awareness and educating your target audience, passing better qualified leads over to sales.

Your sales team would understand how marketing has driven the lead and have a clearer strategy going forwards of how their involvement would move the prospect closer to the point of sale.

Aside from increased revenue and clients, your company will be stronger and more successful thanks to many factors, including:

» Clearer mapping of the sales and marketing processes

» A stronger understanding of your target market

» Better engagement between sales and marketing

What now?

Closing a sale shouldn’t have to be a painful process. Instead, you want to achieve sales and marketing alignment, whereby your teams are best positioned to attract, nurture and convert leads by:

» Improving communication between teams

» Increasing transparency

» Fostering collaboration

Sales and marketing alignment is vital for B2B companies that sell complex products to committees of decision makers over an extended timeframe. Bringing your teams together unveils the golden opportunity to:

» Close the marketing-sales loop

» Build a single revenue-generating engine

» Work together to attract visitors, nurture leads, sell to opportunities and win customers

Continue reading our guide to discover practical insights about how your business can leverage an aligned sales and marketing approach.

Disconnect: the marketing and sales divide

Historically, marketing and sales have worked in silos and developed independently. They’ve previously sat in separate offices, used different technologies and worked towards their own goals.

What are some of the problems that arise from this?

Data disconnect

When marketing and sales don’t share insights, they can’t work towards helping one another achieve success. Many B2B marketers will pass their leads to sales, and never see or hear of these again. Or, marketers will be able to track the volume of leads they’re generating, but struggle to understand which ones later become revenue.

Vital lead information is missed

According to Reachforce, sales reps ignore up to 50% of marketing leads and instead, spend time prospecting their own leads.

If the teams work separately and marketing has historically passed over low-quality leads, it’s understandable that sales would prefer to adopt their own approach.

When it comes to your marketing efforts, it’s worth considering if your sales team is being supported to understand what marketing is doing to drive new leads. Then you should assess the process to ensure sales are always made aware of new leads in their list.

A meeting of minds

The aim of sales and marketing alignment is to ensure everyone is working towards the same objectives. Rather than pushing and pulling in different directions, your sales and marketing should be part of one bigger, seamless process.

This starts with marketing

A common misconception is that marketing is purely a lead-generation machine. In actual fact, marketing occurs before lead generation. Every marketing activity, from an email campaign and blog to organic social posts and paid ads, will simultaneously educate your target audience and raise your company’s profile.

With highly relevant and engaging marketing activity, your team can drive higher quality marketing leads (MLs) of prospects who want to engage with your business.

Before passing these to sales, marketing should pre-qualify their leads to determine their suitability. A marketing qualified lead (MQL) refers to a prospect that the marketing team has worked with and considers a good potential buyer.

Sales takes lead quality assessment to the next level

Before moving ahead, your sales team should evaluate the quality of the MQLs and whittle this list down to a select number of sales accepted leads (SALs). These are leads that the sales team acknowledges are worthwhile and have committed to act on.

Report on revenue, then optimise activity

Both your marketing and sales teams need to be reporting back on revenue, rather than the leads themselves. With marketing attribution tools marketing can report on their revenue generated and optimise their future activity to drive more high-quality leads.

Strategy

How will successful sales and marketing alignment benefit your business?

Simplified workflows

The first step towards bridging the gap between sales and marketing is ensuring your teams work from the same piece of technology. This will help them easily share insights, knowledge and data, as well as track the progression of leads as they move further down the funnel.

Whether you’re creating collaborative project teams or a joint Slack group, it’s vital that everyone is of the same mindset.

Even if your marketing and sales teams aren’t working directly with each other on a given task, they’ll need to understand how each activity feeds into the other team’s objectives.

A shortened sales cycle

The B2B buying process has shifted massively in recent years. Buyers now purposefully delay interactions with sales, often ignoring traditional tactics such as phone calls and emails.

To share the message your customers want and in the way they want it, your sales and marketing teams must work collaboratively as part of a shortened sales cycle.

New tactics your aligned teams should leverage include:

» Audience segmentation – identifying subgroups within the target audience to deliver more tailored messaging

» Targeting – evaluating the potential and commercial attractiveness of each segment

» Content development – the full-cycle creating, distributing and auditing of content to meet a strategic goal

» Nurturing – developing and reinforcing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel

» Content engagement – measuring and evaluating a buyer’s actions when interacting with a piece of your content

» Customer support – ensuring customers are successful in solving whatever issues that drove them to your business

Increased revenue through marketing and clarity on ROI

If you want to report on revenue and highlight ROI across the whole funnel, from the first marketing activity to the minute the sale closes, your teams need to understand how their work is directly impacting each other’s.

First and foremost, everyone’s priorities should be revenue, profit and ROI. Then, if necessary, your teams can report on separate KPIs like lead generation or vanity metrics.

Tactics

How to align your sales and marketing

When marketing and sales can move beyond their differences and work in tandem, they can simultaneously:

» Increase the revenue opportunity

» Shorten the sales and marketing cycle

» Cut costs and improve your cost of acquisition

Here are our seven key steps to begin working in alignment.

1. Define common terms

While this may sound like an obvious first action, the truth is that few companies prioritise taking the time to map out their core terms. According to CSO Insights, only 44% of companies have formally agreed on the definition of a qualified lead between sales and marketing.

Whether it’s a marketing lead (ML), marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales accepted lead (SAL) or sales qualified lead (SQL), your teams will require definitions of the terms they’ll be working with every day. Also, defining the different stages throughout the sales process is essential to ensure that all members of the sales and marketing team, and senior management, clearly understand where every opportunity is throughout the process.

In addition, each stage of the qualification process needs to be outlaid so that both sales and marketing can work towards qualifying each opportunity at each stage of the process.

Having a well-defined, integrated sales and marketing lead / opportunity handling process is essential for future success. Without this, you risk losing and squandering leads and opportunities, rendering your sales and marketing process inefficient and ineffective. The bigger picture consequences to your business are losses of vital revenue and profit, while increasing your cost of acquisition on a lost opportunity.

Whether you use BANTA (budget, authority, need, timeline, activity) to qualify your marketing leads, or adopt something more meaningful like MEDDIC (metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, identify pain, and champion), it’s essential you have strongly defined, agreed qualification criteria for your sales and marketing process. Without this, your success and therefore your ROI will be significantly compromised.

2. Define the goals and strategy together –one team, one process

Next, your sales and marketing need to clarify three keys: lead scoring, lead generation metrics, and sales and marketing processes. With siloed marketing and sales teams, different terminology can develop. A customerfacing marketing term for a product might not be favoured by the sales team.

In this situation, you’ll want to ensure that any differences in terminology are ironed out, helping you provide customers with a consistent sales and marketing approach.

Lead scoring

To determine their sales-readiness, you need a methodology for ranking leads, based on:

» The interest they show in your business and your proposition

» Their current position in the buying cycle

» Their fit in regard to your company

Lead scoring will help to strengthen your revenue cycle, but it’s only effective if sales and marketing come together beforehand to define how they would like to score leads.

Lead generation metrics

Your marketing and sales teams should come together to outline what specifically qualifies a lead as an MQL, SAL, or SQL.

These lead generation metrics will emphasise everyone’s individual involvement in moving the lead further down the funnel, with the end goal of closing the sale in sight.

Defined sales and marketing processes

Your sales and marketing processes should be clearly stated for each phase of the revenue cycle. As these systems become automated, everyone will perform at a higher level.

Getting robust systems in place also provides some documentation, so marketing can demonstrate how someone became an MQL, and sales has a record of their contact with that prospect.

3. Create joint key performance indicators (KPIs)

Once you’ve formalised key lead generation metrics on lead scoring, your company will be ready to create key performance indicators (KPIs).

These are tangible benchmarks designed to help you measure your progress towards an objective.

You can also create overarching OKRs (objectives and key results), which will help your sales and marketing teams to align their work to a common goal.

Marketing KPIs :

» Raise profile

» Contribute to a sustainable pipeline

» Provide ongoing sales support

» Improve conversion

» Recruit key accounts that deliver significant lifetime value

» Percentage increase of lead generation within a certain timeframe

» Uptick in deals closed

Tactical marketing KPIs:

» Delivered activity / work items against the agreed marketing plan – key project deliverables

» Number of campaigns delivered against the agreed marketing plan

Lead generation KPIs:

» Number of EIs (leads)

» Number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads)

» Number of SALs (sales accepted leads – workable opportunities)

Soft sales pipeline (top of funnel) KPIs:

» PG ratio – for every £ spent on lead gen activity, how much pipeline does this generate, as a ratio

» Marketing attribution – marketing attribution is a value that is assigned to supporting the sales process

Examples of OKRs:

» Strengthen your reputation within your industry

» Build your business’ profile and raise awareness to a broad target market

» Manage YoY sustainable growth, without putting the core business at risk

» Recruit and secure the right type of accounts

» Focus on accounts that will deliver significant lifetime value for the company

» Start to develop a sustainable marketing pipeline that supports the sales process

» Provide ongoing sales support and improve conversion

4. Replace the sales funnel with a revenue cycle

Traditionally in sales, the process of moving potential customers through the funnel involved a large audience being sorted down into leads, prospects and finally – clients. Today, this strategy is too simplistic and maintains the divide between sales and marketing. Both teams are operating in a market where they need one another’s input to deliver the personalised attention that prospects expect.

As part of the revenue cycle, your business should be aiming for clients with lifetime value (LTV). Since most businesses have a significant cost of acquisition, it’s more financially viable to win accounts that provide you with a revenue yield YoY, rather than single transactions. With existing customers more likely to buy from you, your costs of transaction thereafter are significantly reduced.

Typically, LTV can be measured between one to three or one to five years. So, if you win an account, it’s worth asking: how much do you believe that account will generate over a three to five year period? This will deliver much improved ROI and heavily reduce your cost of acquisition and transaction. Your account strategy should be – acquire, develop and grow in order to deliver the maximum LTV. To successfully achieve this, you need a KAM (key account management) strategy.

5. Structure your team

Next, you’ll want to establish well-defined, separate roles and responsibilities for each team to fulfil, so there’s no conflict between marketing and sales outputs.

Marketing

At the top end of the funnel, these roles focus on building awareness, education, and soft pipeline (marketing pipeline):

» Demand generation

» Product marketers

» Content marketers

» Digital marketing specialists

» Brand specialists

» Event marketing

Sales

Sales teams look at the bottom end of the funnel to convert leads into customers:

» SDRs (sales development reps) / internal sales managers / internal sales

» BDRs (business development reps)

» Pre-sales specialists

» Sales executive

» High-touch sales (director level)

Depending on your business and sales model, you may not require all of these roles.

Accounts

The third team is separate from marketing and sales and comprises of:

» Key account managers / account managers

» Account directors

» Customer services

» Customer success executives and managers

» Customer / client services directors

Their focus is to review, contact, and qualify marketing-generated leads and deliver them to sales account executives.

These roles are often key to holding a company’s sales and marketing teams together, focusing on the key business needs, rather than the granular or departmental tasks.

Outcomes

What to expect from an integrated approach

Here’s what you can expect when you integrate your sales and marketing teams.

1. A growth-oriented strategy with more targeted sales and marketing activities

When sales and marketing take a holistic view of how to generate revenue, they can work together to form and launch campaigns aimed at achieving that goal.

Then, they can harness the wealth of insights and efficiencies yielded by this alignment to further refine and improve a high-level business strategy for growth.

So, by planning for, promoting, and enabling alignment throughout your company, it will naturally amplify the impact of both marketing and sales activities.

2. Clearer mapping of the sales and marketing process

One of the biggest hurdles B2B organisations face is understanding the purchase process from the buyer’s point of view. This is critical for any organisations adopting an account-based approach.

Sales and marketing alignment removes the artificial funnel division between the two teams, and instead, leads to a holistic view of the buyer journey, from start to finish.

This mapping provides a much more realistic understanding of the prospect’s experience, reducing the risk of making the wrong assumptions about who is involved and in what ways from the buyer’s side.

With an accurate view of the customer journey, marketing and sales can more confidently define and execute campaigns designed to trigger and increase engagement.

3. Stronger understanding of your target market

Your marketing and sales must attract, nurture, and close deals; they therefore need to be on the same page about exactly who they are looking to reach. When your aligned teams work as one, they can create more accurate buyer profiles.

A mutually agreed, clear understanding of your customer promotes shared ownership of the customer experience. This is what customers want, according to our research, where 70% of respondents said sales and marketing collaboration delivers a better buying experience for the customer.

By knowing who out of your teams to engage on the B2B buyer’s journey and when, you can develop a story thread that carries across all stakeholders and enables a smooth handoff between marketing and sales. Internally, your teams will have a greater insight into the factors most likely to influence buyers at various stages of their customer journey.

4. Cohesive customer intelligence

Your marketing and sales teams will gather relevant knowledge about prospects as they interact with and observe them on their buying journey. If valuable insights are openly shared between your teams, everyone will be able to work towards higher conversion and win rates.

This is because marketing and sales will be better positioned to identify and engage with promising potential customers. In fact, the more detailed the lead record, the more accurately the sales team can route leads – and the less time they spend trying to figure out which ones to prioritise.

Information that’s worth sharing includes:

» Customer behaviours

» Preferences

» Interests

» Motivations

» Pain points

» Opinions

5. Better implementation of customer feedback

When marketing and sales work collaboratively, they are more likely to prioritise integrating their systems so they can share and respond to customer data. With enhanced access to customer information, it will be easier for the right people within your teams to act only when the prospect is ready to purchase, and contact them via their preferred method.

6. Better support from business leaders

When an executive team sees the commitment from marketing and sales to coordinate their efforts, they will be motivated to help ensure the success of that alignment.

Business leaders can offer:

» Clear, ongoing communication about the importance of collaboration

» Dedicated resources to ensure and maintain a united approach

» Initiatives to break down departmental silos, such as integrating all necessary tools and even modifying compensation plans to accurately reflect and reward the combined efforts, and drive the right behaviour across both your sales and marketing teams

7. Better engagement between sales and marketing

Unaligned sales and marketing teams execute their own activities, which can sometimes result in a fragmented experience for prospects. It also makes it extremely difficult to pinpoint where exactly leads drop off along the customer journey.

On the other hand, when the two teams interact and brainstorm regularly, they can join forces to amplify the impacts of their efforts.

Working together as a well-oiled machine, marketing and sales can:

» Launch campaigns designed for maximum impact

» Handle leads fluidly

» Engage prospects and wow potential buyers

» Respond with agility and work in unison if market dynamics shift

» Capitalise on the opportunities generated

» Deliver and achieve much better commercial outcomes

Key takeaways

Skyrocket your business’ success

Ready to instil this approach into your business? Here’s a roundup of the tips and tricks we’ve used for our own sales and marketing alignment, as well as observations from many other businesses.

Your single marketing and sales toolkit

Ultimately, your business needs a single, joined up, sales and marketing strategy. Every single one of your sales and marketing processes should be well-defined and meticulously documented. That way, everyone in your business can follow these with ease, helping you maintain robust continuity and offer a seamless approach to customers.

An aligned approach will help you not only win higher value clients and increase your revenue, but it’ll also give you a greater insight into your target market and support better engagement between your sales and marketing teams.

Here are our top seven tips to get started on your business’ sales and marketing alignment:

1. Choose the right sales and marketing automation and reporting tools

2. Invest in strong leadership

Marketing and sales need a leader who can actively help ensure the success of their alignment. Business leaders and senior management can encourage desirable behaviour across these teams, through:

» Continued communication about the importance of an aligned sales and marketing approach

» Allocation of dedicated resources to maintain an aligned way of working

» Promotion of initiatives to break down departmental silos, e.g. integrating all tools, and modifying compensation plans to reflect and reward combined efforts

3. Check-in regularly – one team

When marketing and sales openly share valuable insights about prospects on their buying journey, your teams can work towards higher conversion and win rates. This is because they’ll be better positioned to identify and engage with promising potential customers.

With key customer insights from sales, you’ll find that marketing would do a better job of raising awareness and educating your target audience, passing better qualified leads over to sales.

Your sales team would understand how marketing has driven the lead and have a clearer strategy going forwards of their involvement to move the prospect closer to the point of sale.

4. Work together to drive quality leads

Closing a sale is a shared responsibility. Your teams need to work towards the end goal of getting higher quality leads to enable high-profit sales at an increased rate. You’ll want to create a detailed lead record to help sales teams accurately route leads and spend less time figuring out which ones to prioritise. Before this, you’ll need to have clearly defined your lead scoring metrics, so sales and marketing know exactly how leads are ranked:

» EIs (leads)

» MQLs (marketing qualified leads)

» SALs (sales accepted leads – workable opportunities)

5. Set shared goals

Once you’ve formalised key lead generation metrics on lead scoring, your company will be ready to set goals with key performance indicators (KPIs). These are tangible benchmarks designed to help you measure your progress towards aN objective. Examples of marketing KPIs include:

» Recruit key accounts that deliver significant lifetime value

» Percentage increase of lead generation within a certain timeframe

» Improve conversion

You can also create overarching OKRs (objectives and key results), which will help your sales and marketing teams to align their work to a common goal. Examples of OKRs include:

» Strengthen your reputation within your industry

» Build your business’ profile and raise awareness to a broad target market

» Manage YoY sustainable growth, without putting the core business at risk

6. Report on revenue

You should replace your sales funnel with a revenue cycle, so you can understand how marketing and sales contribute to revenue. Your marketing and sales teams need to report back on revenue, rather than the leads themselves. To increase your revenue opportunity, you want to aim to win clients with high lifetime value (LTV), as these will provide you with revenue YoY, rather than through a single transaction.

7. Use sales insights from closed sales

When marketing and sales work collaboratively, they can integrate their systems to share and respond to customer data. With enhanced access to customer information, it will be easier for the right people within your teams to act only when the prospect is ready to purchase, and contact them via their preferred method.

Why Equals Five?

We are YOUR marketing team that delivers the growth and scale that YOU need. Our marketing teams are experts in delivering marketing for scale-up businesses.

Equals Five’s broad and deep range of marketing experts means that we can deliver fully integrated sales and marketing strategies and programmes that are more than the sum of their parts.

All of our marketing specialists and experts are highly qualified and experienced, we only recruit the best, and our success is intrinsically linked to yours.

Whether your aim is to generate sales pipeline, build your brand reputation, open up new routes to market or to better exploit your existing customer base, your marketing team from Equals Five will help you to build and execute those marketing strategies and programmes that meet those goals, and deliver tangible business results for your company.

» We understand that marketing is a science, and not an art.

» We are your own dedicated marketing team, at a fraction of the cost.

» We provide all the marketing specialists, and experts, that you need to help you grow and scale your business. The big difference is that all these experts work for you part-time, under contract, so you only pay for these marketing specialists when you need them.

» We really get to know your business because we are part of your business! We are part of your team. We work for you, we are committed, focused and dedicated.

Imagine having an experienced, and complete, marketing team for the same cost as a fully weighted, full-time, senior marketing manager!*

Are you ready to take a giant leap forward with your marketing?

Are you ready to build your dream marketing team? Are you ready to take a giant leap forward in the way you market and scale your business?

Then please get in touch for an informal chat on how we can help you achieve your aspirations for your business.

Please contact us by emailing us at hello@equalsfive.co.uk or by calling us on +44 (0) 1202 201930