3 Steps to Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Team

THERE’S OFTEN A LOT OF DISPARITY BETWEEN THE GOALS, PRIORITIES AND ROLES OF SALES AND MARKETING TEAMS IN BUSINESS. MARKETING FOCUS ON BUILDING A BRAND, MAXIMISING OUTREACH AND GENERATING NEW OPPORTUNITIES TO PROGRESS. WHILE SALES NEED TO MEET GOALS, SOLVE PROBLEMS AND CLOSE DEALS WITH THE MOST OPPORTUNE TARGETS – OFTEN UNDER A TIGHT DEADLINE.

Marketers understand that a lot of blood, sweat and tears (figuratively speaking) can be spent building up a pipeline of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL).And that the corresponding number of closed deals can fall short of the number of hours spent on amassing them. So, what’s the issue?

Business development is not a one-step process.

It involves multiple touchpoints, consistent tracking and most importantly, communication between all marketing and sales functions.
According toMarketo, businesses are 67per cent better at closing deals when sales and marketing departments work together. Follow Blueberry’s three easy steps to align your departments and get both teams working in harmony.

1. CRM INTEGRATION

Before you make any changes in the workplace, think about how you currently manage your leads. You’ll probably already have some form of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system in place, but is it being used to its full capacity and effectiveness by each team?

As the saying goes – you only get out what you put in. Make sure both teams are on board with your CRM and are tapping into it as a shared resource.

A functioning CRM is a necessity for companies, helping to ensure your business development is efficient, coordinated, and relevant.
By regularly monitoring and updating your CRM, both teams will have full visibility of qualified leads, opportunities, current clients, and historical communications. This reduces the likelihood of information overlaps and allows both teams to progress leads in the most appropriate way.

Improving your collaboration between teams can start by simply working on the same data, within the same system.

2. COMMUNICATION AUTOMATION

According to a study by Harvard Business Review,

Automating communication to and from your CRM can help you achieve this.

Through Marketing Automation software, you can manage the whole lead nurture process, ensuring tasks, queries and communications are streamlined and actioned at the most opportune moment.

In addition to informing your sales team once a prospect has reached a certain point in the sales funnel, you’ll be able to track all communication and interactions to and from each opportunity.

Whether this is a few marketing emails about a new product, a reply to a query, or a visit to your website. Marketing Automation software can give both teams full visibility, scoring each lead based on their warmth and whether they are considered a MQL. Once they’ve passed this threshold, an automated email can be sent to the sales reps for immediate follow-up.

This not only helps prioritise outreach to the most sales-ready leads, but also improves project management capabilities and encourages collaboration between sales and marketing teams.

3. PLUG THE GAPS IN YOUR SALES FUNNEL

A common concern with prospecting can be ensuring that those initial warm(but not quite ready to buy) leads don’t end up leaking out of your sales funnel altogether.

For instance, marketing has passed a stream of MQLs through to the sales team who has since been labelled as longer-term opportunities. What happens to this pipeline of leads from here?

Using alerts, you can schedule follow-ups around certain milestones. For example, an alert to make contact two months before a lead’s specified renewal date. Marketing can then schedule drip-feed content with offers or targeted messaging to help nurture and secure these leads.

There can be a lot of waiting around within the buyer journey which means leads often go dark for long periods. But that doesn’t mean they should fall off your radar altogether.

Research shows that,

While Marketing Automation can act as a link for sales and marketing cooperation, personal, face-to-face communication will be the key to driving long-term results and revenue growth. So, start talking to each other, build relationships and discover a process which works for both teams.