Sales and marketing are inextricably connected and only through both efforts are you able to close leads and grow your business. Successful businesses understand that collaboration between marketing and sales and a continuous effort to drive synergy between the two departments is essential for healthy growth.
Your teams may currently collaborate and you may feel like they are already aligned, but do they really have a synergized relationship? Today we are considering a number of in depth strategic steps that your business can take to increase the synergy between sales and marketing.
The biggest mistake a business can make is to keep their marketing and sales department completely separate. Collaboration, communication and strategic processes are key to the modern sell.
A synergized team is one where sales and marketing are united in their goals and because of that they experience increased ROI, productivity and growth. In that respect, studies show that synergized teams achieve an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth.
As inbound marketers we like to say that our specialty is delivering high quality leads for sales. How do you differentiate the quality of lead? If your company uses a marketing automation intelligence platform like HubSpot you can easily implement the concept of lead scoring. Lead scoring allows your team to prioritize leads based on qualifying characteristics. To implement a lead scoring system you need demographic and lead intelligence information and then you can assign point values to various characteristics. Your sales and marketing teams will need to work together to determine what qualifiers equate to a great lead. Lead scoring is automated once established, this allows your sales team to focus on those higher quality, warmed up leads.
If your marketing team follows the inbound methodology, you are likely sitting on a number of content assets. This should include testimonials, ebooks, blogs, whitepaper, videos, the list goes on. These are yes, used in your marketing process and likely in your drip campaigns but, your sales team should also be using these assets to move the leads they're handling down the funnel and into customer territory. One way to make finding the right asset easier for your sales team, is to create a catalogue, one that is well labeled based on funnel stage, buyer persona and even by industry. This way they can easily find the resource they need to help facilitate their own sales cycle.
Use your CRM and analytic tracking software to analyze the performance, wins and losses, of your content, campaigns and from the sales side, tactics. From this information you should create a central storage space for your winning content that is universally easy to access and historically successful in producing sales.
On the other side of this, you sales team should also have access to software tools like HubSpot or LeadIn. These tools will help them view how leads are engaging with and responding to content. This type of lead intelligence will allow your sales superstars to learn more about their leads interests and patterns in order to enter the sales conversation informed with a strategy.