The biggest opportunity technology marketers have today is to ensure their department and marketing efforts are aligned with their organizations sales teams.
With a singular focus on driving revenue these two teams in tandem can improve top line sales, ROI, develop and acquire qualified customers and increase overall performance when marketing technology. Although this thought seems quite obvious, this symbiotic relationship still remains less than ideal in many technology companies.
That’s a bit surprising since there is a wide array of resources and process available that recommend steps towards proper alignment. Despite all the resources that exist on the topic, many organizations get overwhelmed by the concept of aligning sales and marketing and never actually take steps to change the situation. They stagnate and continue to execute with sales and marketing at odds. In the meantime, competitors are capturing market share and growing revenue as a result of better sales and marketing execution.
Research group Aberdeen conducted a study and identified some basic starter steps for technology marketing organization to take to begin the alignment process:
- We versus they. As obvious as it may seem, sales and marketing alignment starts with a cultural change. an the attached article outlines a great incentive one CEO at a tech company initiated. Anytime one of the departments used the term “they”, he took budget away and gave it to the other department. This may be a bit extreme, but the point was well taken and each department began to jointly take responsibility for over all performance.
- Standardize the definition of a lead. What is important is that marketing AND sales share the SAME definition for each of these terms. Ultimately, sales should determine what constitutes a “qualified lead,” and marketing should take ownership of educating and influencing prospects to the point they are “qualified” and ready to have a meaningful discussion with sales.
- Marketing Needs to Take Accountability for Influencing the Buying Cycle. Marketers should take full ownership of the buying cycle. Marketing material and campaigns should be structured to address each phase in the buying cycle and help educate and influence prospects. Ultimately, marketing should be leveraging lead nurturing campaigns to educate new prospects, so sales is not wasting time talking to leads that are not ready to buy.
- Increase Quality and Decrease Quantity by Scoring Leads. Lead management technology can help identify a prospects propensity to purchase based on behavior (visits to a Web site, registrations to webinars, whitepaper downloads, etc.) and automatically assign numeric scores. This allows sales to focus limited resources on the best opportunities.
- Integrate Sales and Marketing Technology. CRM has emerged as a critical component to aligning sales and marketing. Both functions share critical data the other can use to increase effectiveness.By integrating CRM and marketing technology, reps can gain a comprehensive view of how marketing interacted with an account. Did they get an email campaign? Which one? Did they click on the email? Did they visit the Web site? Which pages?
- Periodic Meetings Between Sales and Marketing. Seventy-three percent of superior performing organizations sales and marketing departments meet periodically to review performance. Both functions need to be open to feedback about what might work better in the future, and ways they can help each other be more effective.
- Measure What Matters. There are a few basic measurements that ever organization should be looking at: lead-to-sales conversion rates, pipeline thickness, number of new opportunities, bid-to-win ratios, revenue, marketing spend, etc. However, research has revealed that top performing organizations are able to take measurement a step further. In fact, highly competitive B2B organizations are three times more likely than all others to measure customer profitability, customer lifetime value, cost per lead, conversion by campaign, and the percentage of leads that are sent back to marketing from sales.
- Allow Sales to Pass Leads Back to Marketing. If sales and marking are aligned, then there needs to be a way to pass leads seamlessly between both functions. Sales need to be able to pass leads back to marketing for further nurturing if an opportunity in the pipeline suddenly goes cold. Marketing needs to develop separate lead nurturing programs to address the unique needs of a pre-qualified leads that are not yet ready to purchase.
