Integrating B2B Sales and Marketing Strategies
Why are 54% of Sales and marketing professionals noting that an integration leads to positive financial performance?
When Sales and Marketing Collaborate, You Deliver the Ultimate Customer Experience
Without partnerships, tools and a strategy, all your marketing and sales activities might be for nothing. If they don’t work collaboratively to generate and drive contacts through a funnel or pipeline to convert sales, what’s the point? Savvy companies are now realizing that a B2B sales and marketing strategy is the second most important thing after an overall business plan. It should outline how the two departments—sales and marketing—work together to achieve business goals to shape your future success.
What is a Sales and Marketing Strategy and Why Do You Need it?
Aligning sales and marketing strategies reaches, engages and converts contacts into profitable customers. It’s the map that guides the sales and marketing teams in their daily activities by outlining their shared objectives and how they need to achieve them. Basically, it provides the foundation to align the two departments, which genuinely work best together for every B2B company. LinkedIn found that 54% of sales and marketing professionals note collaboration’s positive contribution to financial performance. LinkedIn’s research is also supported by a Marketing Performance Management Report that illustrates sales and marketing alignment as the most important factor to achieve revenue goals. Companies with aligned efforts generated 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts and an average of 32% year-over-year revenue growth.
The outcome of a solid sales and marketing strategy is truly coordinated efforts that can take a large list of prospective customers or contacts, generates awareness about your products or service, introduces them to your company as a solution to their needs and eventually moves them to buy from you. This process, from start to finish, is what most professionals call a funnel.
Integrating Sales and Marketing Into One Will Funnel Leads through the Closing Process
If you have ever worked in marketing or sales, you are likely familiar with the phrase “integrated sales and marketing funnel,” or some variation of it. But do you really understand what this funnel is or the various steps within it? Depending on your background, the funnel may be described differently, with just as many opinions and conversion goal options as there are rules to managing the funnel processes. But at the end of the day, this funnel is a measured, graphical depiction of the steps that take place through a lead-nurturing process.
While a conversion funnel can be applied to many different aspects of sales and marketing, we believe that if you integrate sales and marketing efforts through the steps, the conversion goals will be met more frequently. This is our focus for clients—educating them on why it is important to focus on a full sales and marketing alignment, fed by joint efforts from both departments, new and existing customers, new and mature markets, outbound and inbound practices.
A funnel may look different depending on your company, or the tactics in your sales and marketing strategy. We will break down an example funnel to help makes sense of some various steps and offer some tips on how to combine sales and marketing in a way that nurtures all the leads fed into it and moves them through closing.
Awareness: This first step of the funnel, sometimes referred to as the “top,” is the place where all your contacts go. You’ve collected lead generation forms from trade shows, collected submission forms from digital advertising, exported your subscriber list for a newsletter, etc. If you are used to using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, think of this phase as the list of every contact in your database—nothing more than a contact—regardless if they are a potential or existing customer.
Engagement: This is the true start to the funnel. It’s where you take that list of contacts, work with the sales AND marketing teams to sort the list and decide if and how to best engage each contact. How should they be categorized? What are their pain points or needs? What is the best way to engage them? Do the sales managers personally reach out, visit their facilities, or call them? Do the marketing managers feed the contact information into an automated newsletter campaign? Do the marketing specialists target digital or printed advertisements toward the companies or industries?
Conversion: Once the initial engagement begins, and the contact begins to show interest, they can be moved further into the funnel as either a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) or a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)—and may even move between the next two steps before they close.
MQL: A Marketing Qualified Lead is a contact that was engaged/reviewed by the marketing team and satisfies criteria identifying it as a potential sale. This may be a contact that is regularly opening and engaging with a newsletter, submitted a contact form on a website, or is engaging on social media.
SQL: A Sales Qualified Lead is a contact that is engaged/reviewed by the sales team and qualifies as a convertible active customer. As we mentioned earlier, contacts may move between SQL and MQL before finally converting. If a SQL grows cold or uninterested, it may make most sense to hand it back to the marketing team for more nurturing and engaging before it once again moves into the SQL phase.
Closing: After a customer is presented a proposal or quote, it moves into closing where it can covert the deal and become an active customer.
Ideally each phase of this marketing and sales funnel should be quantifiable so that your team can identify areas for improvement. It’s important to know and continuously monitor how many leads go in, slip out and move through closing. If carefully nurturing prospects through the funnel, it’s possible the contacts will get lost to your competition at any step. Lead nurturing needs to be a strategic, joint effort between the marketing and sales teams to ensure conversion metrics remain high and revenue numbers climb. Just because a lot of leads are entered in the funnel, doesn’t mean a lot of sales will close. The key to success—reaching your company’s sales and revenue goals—is to not only fill the funnel at the top with new opportunities, but to continuously move “closed” contacts back into the top for more development.
The Importance of Aligning Sales and Marketing Strategies
We hope this example of how funneling leads through sales and marketing teams can work illustrates the importance of blending sales and marketing strategies. Every company knows that not every lead is an ideal fit for your product or service. Having both teams work in tandem will help weed through the prospects to define who is the best fit and has genuine interest. A well-defined, combined strategy and funnel will help you determine how to best engage with the contact based on what step of the process they are in.
How to Manage Your Sales and Marketing Efforts Effectively
Understanding the various steps of your sales and marketing funnel—how contacts move through them, what are the challenges and hold ups, etc.—will help you more effectively manage the entire funnel. But there are strategies and tools that can help you optimize your teams’ efforts and prevent problems.
Identify specific requirements that are needed for a prospect to move to the next step. These means that both the sales and marketing teams need to successfully qualify contacts. Poor qualifications cause a lot of inefficiencies and frustrations that may be noticed by the contact. Proper marketing and sales alignment with outlined requirements will allow both teams to properly collaborate to convert the lead.
Customize your CRM in ways that collect as much of a contact’s data as possible--not just phone, email, company, etc., but also track their online actions, information they provide on surveys or forms and one-on-one interactions, into a single profile. Your marketing and sales personnel need to be able to update the contact’s profiles. You should also be able to set up a lead priority system, segmentations and triggered alerts that will let you know when they can move into the next funnel step, or if they aren’t moving fast enough. You also may be able to implement automations to help ensure you’re engaging contacts at the right time.
Implement dashboards and reporting processes to ensure you and your team can monitor performance and have transparency of everything happening in the funnel. Having transparency across department teams will not only provide the team a better understanding of the process, but also gives them the ability to offer solutions for improvements.
How to Evaluate Sales and Marketing Alignment
When you have a well-defined funnel, you can provide your team with vital statistics they can use to measure success. There can be a strategic emphasis on learning from the wins and losses—extending those lessons to key industries, product and solution improvements, or potential new growth opportunities. Also, if you outline key measurements of success in your funnel cycle, you can create success stories that can be used to feed your funnel. This establishes credibility to move forward with cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Some success story examples include:
The average time a prospect moves from initial interest to closing.
What step does a prospect linger or grow cold? How long do they sit there and why?
What are the characteristics of prospects that do move through the funnel? What sets them apart from those that don’t? How can you adjust efforts to pull the lingering prospects through?
For guidance on how to align your sales and marketing efforts for the ultimate customer experience, or to build your own B2B sales and marketing strategy, contact the crew at WayPoint Marketing Communications.