How To Align Sales & Marketing In Three Simple Steps

Industry consultants will charge thousands to map out an elaborate marketing-to-sales process for your business. But aligning your sales and marketing teams doesn't have to be that complex – or that expensive. In fact, the best way to get started is to find incremental improvements you can make to your current processes. By starting simple, you can learn as you go and adjust as needed. This how-to article reveals three simple ways to get started.

By Lisa Cramer

Marketing and sales need to work together in some form along a defined lead management process. Not doing this is costing companies more than wasted leads – it's increasing sales costs and reducing revenue growth. I'm not suggesting that sales and marketing will ever become best friends, nor am I even suggesting that you can remove all friction between them. However, it's apparent that the legacy marketing-to-sales process most companies have let evolve is flawed. For one thing, today's buyers, equipped with the Internet, have changed the way they reach decisions about products and services, which means many of the approaches that used to work no longer do.

There are three simple ways that marketing and sales can start aligning themselves. And, these things can be done informally, one step at a time so they build on each other. We often hear marketers say they want to nurture leads more before handing them to sales. But the reality is that sales doesn't want marketing to reduce the number of leads they are passing to them, even if industry stats show that sales ignores on average 80 percent of the leads they receive from marketing. So how can we revise the process so marketing can provide more value, sales can start seeing that value and basic alignment between the two entities starts to happen?

1. Start tracking real digital behavior.

Marketing now has the ability through marketing automation technology to start tracking more than simple opens and clicks. Opening an email and clicking a link doesn't necessarily indicate interest from your prospect these days. Maybe over time the number of clicks per lead will help indicate some possible interest, but when you start tracking the pages that leads view, how long they spend on each page, how often they interact with your company digitally and more, you can start understanding real interest. You can also start seeing, digitally, what specifically they are interested in. By tracking page views and form fills, for example, you can start seeing what products and services they are spending their time reviewing. What case studies and whitepaper subjects do they seem to find the most interesting? This type of information is priceless, especially when sales can see the lead's interaction history and use it to make warmer outbound calls.

Track metrics that mean something.These days, marketing can provide more impact and accountability to the sales pipeline by tracking where leads went in the pipeline, what assets they looked at, what interactions they've had, and more. It's important for marketers to be able to analyze the effectiveness of their campaigns, not so much by the click percentage, but by how the campaign affects revenue. Marketers need to analyze what prospects did and how they flowed into the pipeline. Were these the right type of prospects at the point that sales started to interact with them? Moving forward, sales and marketing need to start discussing what a "sales ready" lead is and when it should be passed from marketing to sales. And, marketers need to take responsibility for driving metrics that matter – the ones beyond simple opens and clicks – to deliver information that is meaningful for the business.

Define and produce "sales ready" leads. As mentioned previously, marketing and sales need to arrive at a mutual definition of what constitutes a "sales ready" lead. And what we are really talking about here is the point at which marketing determines a lead to be ready to send to sales. This should be the point at which the lead has been qualified enough that it is ready for a salesperson's time and attention. Depending on your process, this might not just be related to digital marketing and effective nurturing. For instance, many companies integrate telemarketing and/or inside sales to further qualify leads before handing them to sales. Either way, it's important that a sales ready lead definition be created and agreed upon. As part of this, marketing needs to understand what it needs to "acquire" about the prospect and sales needs to agree to the level of qualification that marketing can and should supply. The more solid the "sales ready" lead definition, the more effective the lead management process becomes.

Sales and marketing don't need to become best friends, nor must they operate as one cohesive unit in order for some increase in revenue and reduction in unnecessary costs to occur. Of course, there's no debating that the more aligned sales and marketing become, the more effective the company's lead management process is, maximizing revenue potential and reducing both marketing and sales costs. However, we can't just join hands and start singing Kumbaya together to make these things instantly occur. It takes time and effort, and often some trial and error. But know this: By working to implement these key steps, it's possible to begin to streamline current inefficient processes and start down the path toward greater success.

About the Author
Lisa Cramer is president and co-founder of LeadLife Solutions, a provider of an on-demand lead management solution that helps drive revenue by bundling a state of the art marketing automation platform with highly-experienced marketing and sales specialists. In 2009 and 2010, Lisa was recognized as one of the top five "Most Influential People" in sales lead management, and in 2011 was named one of the Top 20 Women to Watch in sales lead management.

SOURCE: LeadLife Solutions