This week we take an introductory look into sales and marketing alignment. Starting from the 101 of exactly what sellers and marketers do in 2015, and leading up to 5 best-practice recommendations to make sales and marketing alignment happen more easily at your organization. Technology solutions that many marketers use today will be examined, and some suggestions for making the 5 best-practices more attainable will be explained.
Background: It’s all about Alignment
Marketing and sales are areas of business where the synergy, planning, and overall dynamic between the two departments can vary widely from one organization to another. Yet, regardless of the structural dynamic, world-class business leaders view the two departments as complimentary to one another, and businesses who better align the two departments tend to see noteworthy improvements in several performance indicators.
World-class leaders in this area understand that both departments must share a single view of the customer. Sales generally become intimately aware of their key clients, while marketing understands segments, trends, and competitor movement. Combining these crucial awareness concepts can ensure greater effectiveness across all functions.
Marketing and sales share common market desires but differ on key terminology. Thought leaders in this strategy ensure that their marketing and sales teams are intimately aware of each other’s terminology, and also, what impact those key terms carry when communicated.
Sales tends to be occupied with lead generation, sales calls, and closing; marketing with branding, segmenting, and delivering value. Sometimes the final objectives differ widely, and when they do, execution falters. Leaders in this area ensure that both teams share aligned goals.
Communication is king at this stage. World-class leaders in alignment ensure that key information is communicated often and when it is most essential. Whether by automating marketing through your CRM or SFA system, or posting summaries to be syndicated, communication is essential between these teams if effective alignment is desired.
Finally, leaders in this area of alignment know that support is a must. Sellers sell, but marketers know how to retain and win-back. Regardless of fault, reason, or, stage of buying cycle, marketing can support sales with creative and effective campaigns to bring back lost leads, prospects, clients, etc.
As always, the enablement technology behind these groups is often the difference between resounding success and sustained roadblocks.
Introduction: Changing Scopes
The divide in sales and marketing stems more from established roles, not history. In fact, the two teams are more alike than they are dissimilar.
The sales process was once primarily focused around canned selling and aggressive selling of products to the most people. Today we follow a trust based relationship sales process which encourages consultation and mutual benefit. Sellers focus on developing their relationships and knowing their buyers better than they know themselves.
Marketing followed a similar path, beginning with a focus on production and costs, the concept has moved through selling with a renewed focus on marketing in and of itself. Marketing believes that success is derived from delivering on a value proposition.
From this we get the common conflict between two departments, when revenue is down, sales blames marketing for poor lead generation, and marketing blames sales for poor lead development.
Now, if you’re already well in tune with the idea of sales and marketing alignment, this post may be a little too introductory for you, and I suggest moving up to this post about achieving sales and marketing alignment for a viable sales strategy, where more complex issues are covered such as digital content ROI, closing data-analytics gaps, and a drop in the perceived value of vendor content.
The 101: What does a Marketer do?
Understanding the value of alignment comes from knowing the other side. If you’re unfamiliar, here’s a quick review of the 21st century marketer. Marketers are primarily concerned with the marketing process, summarized as:
Understanding the marketplace, which includes everything from customer needs/wants/demands, competitor positioning & offerings, and the marketing environment.
Designing a customer driven strategy, which is primarily defined by a value proposition and segmenting of the consumer market into actionable groups.
Constructing an integrated program which accounts for product, price, place and promotions with the goal of delivering superior value.
Building customer relationships (CRM), ensuring customer satisfaction and maintaining profitable relationships.
And finally, capturing value and customer equity through increased share of wallet and overall customer lifetime value through loyalty.
The 101: What does a Sales Specialist do?
The 21st century seller embodies many marketing functions. The trust based relationship model is a process that the modern seller applies to every interaction. This is summarized by:
Having ethical foundations and a strategy based on customer needs and value.
Initiating customer relationships through understanding customer value and discovering needs.
Developing customer relationships by creating & communicating value through sales dialogue and earning sales commitment.
Finally, enhancing customer relationships through post-sale follow-up and creating new opportunities.
Because of this traditional trust-based outline, I think that sales reps are made, not born. This 5th of a 5-part blog series about closing more deals, and how to improve your sales presentation, is a great insight into why sales reps are made, with a little peak into the history of sales.
[RELATED CONTENT] Sales and marketing alignment is only one of the many tactics we strongly suggest every B2B business employ when looking to enhance their sales process and tailor their digital content management. To learn all of them, and the trends which influence the need for these tactics, please download the free eBook below.
The Alignment: Best Practices
The benefits of aligning become almost obvious when sales rep and marketing processes are placed side by side. Marketing teams are the core drivers of leads and intimately understand the market. When aligned with sales, they receive a clearer understanding of the target customer (the ones that actually buy) and improve marketing performance overall. When sales aligns with marketing, they benefit from greater awareness and an understanding of customer interaction right at the start of the funnel.
With all this, there are five best practice strategies for strengthening sales and marketing alignment.
1) One single view of the customer
The whole concept of alignment is around a clearer, more holistic picture of the customer. This can be achieved in any number of ways but as a general rule of thumb, the more information that can be shared between the two the better. Real time, consistent, 360 degree views of the customer ensure that marketing strategy and selling tactics can be changed when needed, and are always customer-centric.
Among the best ways to achieve a single view of the customer is to have a well-integrated CRM system. Marketing teams generally use a marketing automation system to create personas for accurate lead nurturing campaigns. In the best cases, those personas are associated with contacts in the CRM, and this integration allows for content scoring, clearer MQL delineations, and etc.
For sales reps, the CRM, which is usually a SFA program, holds descriptive contact details about their leads, and even call details from past interactions. The issue is that digital content consumption by sales reps doesn’t influence their insight capabilities like it does for marketers.
Each interaction by a sales rep influences the knowledge held by the customer and their respective decision journey. Every subsequent interaction needs to build value, rather than reiterate past conversations.
Check out this post about which digital content types to use for each purchase decision stage, for a deeper insight into how you can manage this balance.
2) Shared Definitions
As simple as it may seem, stronger synergy can be achieved by ensuring that your marketing team and sales team has an intimate understanding of the terms shared between the two. Simple things like lead and prospect mean a lot to a seller but not to a marketer; and things like value proposition and segmenting variables mean a lot to a marker but less to a seller.
Understandably, these difference in terminology stem from the scope of interactions both teams have, where sales is largely 1-to-1, and marketing it 1-to-many.
When both teams can agree on how they define a MQL, what constitutes a valuable lead, how personas are defined, and etc., there is a greater appreciation for how one team influences the success rates of the other.
When this tactic is combined with a single view of the customer empowered by end-of-funnel consumption insights, year-over-year improvements in MQL quality and lead generation are seen.
3) Aligned Goals
Goals include performance measures like KPIs.
Both marketing and sales must align their objectives so that they complement their efforts and investments in time. Common KPIs that a company chooses to measure its performance against must also be aligned. You should not simply measure your marketing team on leads and your selling team on sales, a common and/or cross-functional metric ensures that you can effectively facilitate stronger alignment.
So, what do I mean by that?
Part of the issue around siloes in sales and marketing revolves around the goals of both teams pushing their behaviors into siloes. If the marketing team is judged based on their generation of leads, they will continue to generate lots of leads, regardless of quality.
As for sales reps, if they’re only judged on total sales, they’re going to do whatever it takes to make a sale right away, regardless of whether there may have been a more profitable combination of products and services, but at the risk of a longer sales cycle.
Obviously these are generalizations, but only to a point, and what I’m trying to help you see is that these goals do not align both teams. A stronger alternative is to have your marketing teams be responsible for sales number, and your sales reps responsible for MQL acceptance and the use of content in an effective way.
Like this, you can focus on improving MQLs, getting more ROI from marketing, reducing the sales cycle, and influencing alignment among both teams, simply by motivating each team to move together through their goals.
4) Communicate
Though it seems that a 360 degree view of the customer already ensures communication, it’s not always that easy. Marketing functions can sometimes get lost in the fog, and ensuring that the sales team is well informed about important customer information and market changes as they occur can mean the difference between synergy and conflict.
I’ve actually cited strong communication in past articles, and the real issue with communication is twofold. One, communication quality plays a major role in the value and effectiveness of outcomes from insights, and two, sales and marketing teams don’t always work in the same location, moreover, many sales reps operate outside the office, making communication even more difficult.
The immediate solution that many will fall on is the creation of videos for streamlined communication, as you can optimize exactly what to say, and say it to everyone, even remotely. I don’t disagree with this logic, but there are two issues with it, the information is still anecdotal, and, there is little room for collaboration.
Anecdotal information just means that the information is based on personal opinion or informal evidence. So, if the marketing team does meet with sales to understand content effectiveness, they’re going to base their insights on the perceptions of sales reps, rather than actionable hard-data.
Collaboration is just that, a two-way discussion for planning and coordination. This means that you need to bring people to a common area for a shared discussion.
The solution to this comes from CRM integration that enables closed loop marketing, and remote conferencing technology which should be built into your mobile sales application.
Sales and marketing alignment is a growing strategy today, but as digital content marketing continues to develop, this buzz-word will become an essential operation, and the technology you use in sales and marketing must support this alignment.
5) Supportive Marketing
Sales have a daunting task of investing in their clients relationships and sustaining the conversation. Marketing has the tools and skills required for win-back and retention. When leads get lost, for whatever reason, the marketing team can implement a wide array of traditional and non-traditional win-back programs to feed the funnel. A lost customer for now is not a lost customer for forever, and sellers don’t often have the time to invest in lost opportunities.
Suggesting supportive marketing is something I always need to follow up with clarification, because many content marketers ARE creating digital content for sales reps to use, they often call this “supportive marketing”.
This misconception is one of the major reasons that sales enablement exists in the first place. Digital content marketing is missing the mark for sales reps far and wide, and even with a perfect content marketing team, content can still fail to support the sales process, especially near the end of the sales funnel.
I invite you to check out this post about the top 10 reasons that content marketing damages the sales process, for a look into why effective content marketing can still fail the sales rep who uses it.
Alignment Resources: helping Bridge the Gap with Enablement Technology
If it’s not already obvious, all of the strategies detailed above can be further simplified and implemented more effectively with a real sales enablement solution.
If you’re new to sales enablement, and the trends that exist in the marketplace that influence the need for it, please read this post we made recently about what is sales enablement, and a sales enablement definition for 2015.
If you’re aware of the concept, lets take a look at two technologies within any (hopefully) sales enablement program that can help achieve these best practices.
Data Analytics
Remember what I said about single view of the customer, shared goals, and anecdotal information? Integrated data analytics are an effective way to mitigate the challenges and support the proposed solutions.
This is because this kind of solution pushes consumption data to the marketing team from sales operations. The content that actually influenced a sale, the formats that really matter, the pain-points to focus on, and etc. all begin to shape the development of new content.
Data also impacts sales reps in the exact same way. Instead of sending content and making follow-up calls, sales reps can ‘see’ what the buyer was looking at, compare that to past success, and optimize their communications in the future.
By this point in reading I think you’re ready to read (if you haven’t already read it) our more advanced article about achieving sales and marketing alignment for a viable sales strategy. Here you’ll see a more comprehensive look into why and how closed loop marketing, or closed loop data analytics, influence sales and marketing results.
Remote Conferencing
At Skura, we call this co-browsing, but everyone has their own name for it. This is about being able to have a digital content-based discussion with anyone around the world. This is more than sharing the screen on your laptop, and why we prefer 'co-browsing'.
Co-browsing is a collaborative remote digital sales application that enables any user to have a content-based conversation with any other number of actors through any device or medium. One rep could be in the field with a tablet, the other in an office, and etc.
Your mobile sales application and office sales enablement platforms should enable several actors to collaborate remotely in the same way they would an office boardroom.
This kind of solution also allows you to sell to customers remotely as well, which is why it must be a program which operates without the need for inhibitive plug-ins or downloads.
[RELATED CONTENT] I could talk forever about sales and marketing alignment, it’s just one of those things. But I’d like to leave you with something more tangible for this post. The whitepaper below is a case study of the solution we provided to Urgo Medical, a large life sciences firm that saw some of the benefits we just covered through Skura SFX technology.
If you’re interested in a technology solution that aligns your marketing automation and CRM for a full end-to-end sales-marketing collaborative network, consider requesting a demo, and let us show you how Skura has helped others achieve stronger alignment.
