A while back I read Bill Stinnett’s excellent book, Think Like Your Customer, which should be required reading for anyone in Sales and Marketing, especially if you market high-value products and services. A glaring Marketing Operations disconnect for many companies is our tendency to over-focus on What and How we want to sell, when we really need [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Sales-Marketing Alignment’
6 reasons why your organization might need a Marketing Automation Solution
In a world where every day hundreds of ideas, products and business solutions take shape and hundreds more make a beeline for our fleeting attention, it is essential to know which of these merit the time and resources spent in exploring their worthiness and their relevance in our organization’s scheme of priorities.
This post is an effort to put down the kind of problems the marketing automation tool is capable of addressing and the kind of organizations who should opt for this solution, if it is in alignment with their overall objectives and budget constraints.
Getting The Most Out of Marketing Automation With CRM Integration
Arguably the most important value-add of implementing a marketing automation system is the alignment of marketing and sales. By being able to share lead information in real time, you can ensure that you are presenting the best messages to the right prospects at the exact right time. But all of this cannot happen on marketing automation alone. Better alignment is only possible through tight integration of your marketing automation platform with your customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Beyond Marketing and Sales Alignment
Since every company is a system perfectly designed to produce the revenue it is producing if you want more revenue you have to change the system design. This means you have to tune the organizational effectiveness to support the sales process; you have to recognize that everyone affects sales results by the decisions they make daily and how effective they coordinate customer facing actions. Sales results are the scorecard for the entire company, not just the marketing organization. Revenue is a downstream measure of the organizational effectiveness upstream.
A Model for Aligning Sales and Marketing Processes
Sales and Marketing alignment is a complex issue involving culture, processes, politics and egos. All of this may seem daunting to an eager sales or marketing manager who simply wants to drive improved revenue results in their company by getting Sales and Marketing to collaborate more effectively.
Regardless of the complexity and obstacles, there is one relatively simple (but not entirely easy) step that companies should take immediately. This is to identify the stages of the buyer’s journey and align their sales and marketing processes to it.
Is Sales a Mere Bystander in Marketing Automation?
Is Marketing Automation solely within a marketer’s purview? Does Sales have nothing to contribute?
Today, the decision on which Marketing Automation, sales enablement or lead generation tool & platform will get used in an organization is largely a marketer’s call, but for successful implementation it requires wider participation. Especially, the Sales Department needs to weigh-in with crucial input. Let’s examine which are these inputs and collaboration opportunities.
Why are Sales and Marketing Usually Unaligned?
There are three reasons why mis-alignment is present.
1. Top management doesn’t understand the full contribution that Marketing can make and should make to the business.
2. Marketers are not adequately trained to be true partners with Sales in the revenue generation process.
3. There isn’t an integrated planning process to enable (or force) Marketing and Sales to craft unified strategies and tactics.
Lead Generation is a Marathon, Marketing Automation Makes it a Sprint
In truth, Marketing Automation tool, significantly shortens the time between lead generation and lead closure, not because it facilitates lead nurturing and lead nurturing programs (using email tools), but because it recognizes the buying process as a group activity and hence takes into account all activities by an enterprise at different times before qualifying them as a ‘sales ready lead’.
Inside Sales Team – Unsung Heroes?
Inside Sales teams are often just associated with ‘cold calling’ and doing the dirty work for the Sales team – passing ‘Sales Ready Leads’ on set criteria to the Sales Team to close them. Often their job is supposed to be getting ‘meetings’.
While the Sales team takes all the credit for bringing in deals…are the Inside Sales teams the unsung heroes?
Ending the Sales & Marketing Blame Game
Every company which has marketing and sales departments has at some point, witnessed the famous – sales and marketing fight and blame game – more commonly known as the sales and marketing mis-alignment. In a B2B set up these differences are more glaring as compared to a B2C company.In most B2B companies, the primary objective of marketing is to generate quality business Leads and of sales to convert these into closed deals. Both these departments are also measured based on the number of Leads generated and the number of sales closed, respectively.
In reality the role of marketing in a B2B company is relationship building and that of sales to use this relationship and help the prospect make a rational buying decision based on business value offered by the company’s solutions.
Irrespective of how companies want to position their marketing and sales objectives the truth is marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin.
