I see it so often, marketing does their thing and sales do their thing, but they just don’t communicate effectively.
I ask many prospects if they know precisely how many leads and sales they get by channel, we well as how much revenue is generated by each lead source, and the answer more often than not is… no, we don’t.
Here’s how marketing and sales can work together to supercharge performance.
Data & Insights
It’s paramount to share data. We see some companies with endless spreadsheets. Most of the time, they simply need a decent CRM (think Infusionsoft, HubSpot, etc).
Collaboration will yield big-time improvements in important performance metrics: for example, sales cycles will be shorter, market-entry costs will go down, and the cost of sales will be lower.
Communicate!
Sales and marketing teams need regular alignment meetings – I’d suggest once a week to start with to discuss initiatives and to share data and feedback on what’s working and what’s not (you can use the likes of Zoom, GoToMeeting or Google Hangouts).
Proper alignment between sales and marketing will lead to a jump in marketing revenue, with higher win rates and better customer retention.
Sales are able to gain first-hand knowledge of customers and their top objections – much of which you don’t gain any other way – and these can be shared with marketing.
Marketing is likely to have hard data that shows what sort of information, content, or language customers and potential customers respond to, which can be shared with sales.
Ultimately, this collaboration allows for the creation of great content at every stage of the marketing funnel including top of funnel ‘unaware’ videos, blogs, webinars etc to drive people into the awareness and consideration phases, all the way through to great post-purchase and retention content too.
Follow Up (Lead Gen)
For lead gen businesses, sales teams need to actually follow up on leads generated by marketing and use a decent CRM/reporting system as above to report on lead quality and revenue by lead source. Without this, marketing has zero idea how effective their work is.
Injecting CRM Data into Google Analytics
Depending on the stage you’re at with your business, you can get even smarter and actually automatically inject enquiries from your site into your CRM like we do at Koozai (using something like Zapier).
You can even then inject the GAID with the enquiry to take an identified user in Google Analytics (GA), find out who that same user is in the CRM database, match up the two, and then add their associated CRM data into Google Analytics. This enables you to report on revenue by lead source in GA, but be warned this is advanced and takes some development work.
Ecom
For ecom businesses, the marketing team need to liaise and work with the acquisition and ecommerce team, to achieve the fundamental basics to acquire, convert and retain customers.
Both teams are involved in everything from driving awareness and traffic, through to CRO and converting customers, as well as email flows, follow-ups and retention/reward strategies. So, collaboration is key as well as sharing ecommerce insight from the platform (for example Shopify) so you can segment and use data for marketing (for example email flows in Klaviyo or similar).
The beauty with ecom is literally every metric is trackable and you have all the data points you could ever want at your fingertips to see what channels and campaigns are driving your sales, revenue and profit.
Positioning
The main goal of positioning is to narrow and to become more relevant to fewer people. Once you have identified what the ideal client looks like for your business, you’ll need to build intelligence on the companies and people you want to engage with. The more you know about your prospects, the more timely, relevant, and tailored you can be with your marketing communication.
But as above, you need somewhere (a CRM) to house all that super valuable data and insight. Sales and marketing need to work together to ensure the data is accurate.
Develop Personas & Use A.I.
Marketing can understand your future customers needs and user journey by mapping out not only current customers conversion paths, but also spot lucrative future ones too.
As an example, at Koozai we then combine that data with our advanced predictive purchase process to create campaigns that get to, and acquire your customers, before your competitors do.
Through backward engineering the sales insight and data from the sales/ecommerce team, you can then create accurate and lucrative personas that have a high propensity to convert using your own first-party data.
Tracking Offline Conversion Events
This subject is massive and needs a detailed post in its own right, but it goes without saying that marketing and sales need to work together on this.
Marketing needs to ensure the mechanism is in place to track offline conversion events and sales need to complete the actions.
So, for example, if the marketing team is running a campaign on Google Ads, Google Ads Conversion Import allows you to import conversions that you track in any other system into Google Ads for offline or in-store conversion events.
Or if you’re running a paid media campaign to drive sales calls, by importing call conversion information into Google Ads, you can track which of your ads and keywords result in the most sales calls for your business. Instead of using a click ID as with conversions from clicks, you track information about the phone calls that resulted in sales or other valuable customer actions. This relies on the sales team recording the information correctly.
Multi-Channel Comms
Sales and marketing need to align how they speak to customers across channels and have the agility to respond on multiple platforms. This ensures continuity, consistency and maintaining the same story and tone of voice.
For example, customers will engage via social media as well as email/phone, so the comms need to be consistent across teams. Both teams can share insight that develops the empathy to understand the customer’s point of view and what customers want.
Also, most of the latest CRMs follow the client from the beginning of the user journey throughout their lifetime with you. A good CRM enables the key ingredient of personalisation, which is essential to increase lifetime value, loyalty and advocacy too. Sales and marketing can align to ensure the right message and content reaches the customer at every stage of the funnel across every appropriate channel.
Summary
To simplify, ultimately sales and marketing are both working towards the same goal, securing business and helping their company grow profitably.
Marketing is designed to increase awareness of a brand or product to the target consumer as a whole. Sales is a direct process in which the team talks to the customer (phone, in-person or digitally) and steers them towards making a purchase.
We hope this article helps you to better align sales and marketing to boost your revenues and profits and to reach higher goals.
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