4 concrete actions to align Marketing and Sales during the day

[tonmoypramanik]

But there you have it, between Marketing and Sales, it's not a great love affair . To such an extent that the alignment of Marketing and Sales is becoming a major issue in B2B.

To help you successfully meet the challenge, we offer 4 actions to implement today to align Marketing and Sales.

Don't waste any more time, your business development depends on it: invite the Marketing and Sales departments to a working meeting now and work on the following points :

🗓 1. To align Marketing and Sales, align goals
If Marketing and Sales do not move forward together, it is often because they do not have the same interests.

I worked for a long time as a Marketing Manager. My remuneration depended on the panama email list turnover generated directly from my actions while the salespeople were interested in the contracts they signed.

This compensation mechanism is completely outdated and generally creates tensions between Marketing and Sales.

Marketing passes leads to sales, but since they don't work together, conversion is difficult. As a result, Marketing questions the skills of Sales and Sales mentions the poor quality of Marketing leads.

To align Marketing and Sales, this inevitably involves defining common objectives. The thinking here is simple :

You have a turnover objective which translates into the volume of new customers.
With your conversion rate, you know how many leads are needed to sign these new customers.
From then on, you are able to define SMART objectives with Marketing to generate this volume of qualified prospects based on the number of visits to your website and all the key indicators linked to the actions you take to attract these visits.

🗓 2. To align Marketing and Sales, determine the ideal prospect
To meet the expectations and behaviors of the modern B2B buyer, Marketing must generate qualified leads from the Internet in sufficient quantity to enable Sales to achieve the turnover objective.

But for this mechanism to work, Marketing and Sales must agree on what a qualified prospect is .

To align Marketing and Sales, the second thing to do is therefore to work on a common definition of the typical profile of your ideal prospect.

Marketing has the ability to qualify a prospect through well-designed forms on your website and by monitoring their online behavior. However, to do this effectively, Sales must share their field experience with them.

When we are approached by a company to align Marketing and Sales, our first question to the sales department is simple: which prospects do you like to deal with?

From this discussion with the marketing department comes a detailed portrait of the ideal prospect: the Persona .

🗓 3. To align Marketing and Sales, define your Lead Scoring
To convert a prospect into a customer, you have to solicit them at the right time.

As we have seen previously, the buyer prefers to carry out the majority of their purchasing considerations alone and only agrees to contact a salesperson when making a decision.

To deal with this expectation, the salesperson must intervene at the best time, when the prospect is sufficiently mature.

However, very often, the companies we meet do not take into account the buyer's process and Marketing passes the leads to Sales too early . And that's where things get stuck, hence the tensions.

Aligning marketing and sales: a crucial issue

To optimize your lead/customer conversion rate and align Marketing and Sales, both departments must jointly define what characterizes a mature prospect .

The goal here is to note the maturity of a prospect – to score them – based on demographic criteria but also on the history of their behavior on your website and with regard to your communications.

Configured in a Marketing Automation tool, Lead Scoring allows you to automatically transmit a mature lead to the Sales department so that they can contact them at the right time.

At the same time, Marketing must do everything possible to fuel the buyer's thinking and gradually bring it to maturity.

🗓 4. To align Marketing and Sales, write an SLA
At the end of the working meeting during which you defined all the elements above, do not forget to draw up a Marketing and Sales alignment document presenting in black and white the commitments of the two departments .

This Marketing and Sales alignment document is an SLA: Sales Level Agreement.

The aim of the SLA is to engage the two services more officially, to ensure their good collaboration but also to facilitate the arrival of new skills.