Even with Service-level Agreements (SLA) and regular meetings, your marketing team may not be doing enough to connect with your sales team. It’s important that your marketers look for additional ways to show the sales team how their efforts are helping achieve revenue goals.
One way of doing this is by having your marketers think about the sales team as another customer base, and try to “market” the role of marketing to that internal audience.
Getting sales and marketing to work together can feel like a real challenge, but it's worth the effort. One way to get them thinking like a team is to let those two groups actually get together and interact in person.
Regular meetings between the two groups fosters communication and collaboration, and helps sales and marketing managers improve their tactics.
Failing to monitor progress is a common mistake made by companies with poor alignment between sales and marketing – and it can be costly.
If you’re not keeping an eye on your goals, you’re less likely to spot areas of concern until they spiral into big problems. At that point it may be too late to do anything about it.
Manage your sales and marketing alignment with these two valuable tools:
Making your Service-Level Agreement (SLA) convincing to your sales team is important to their productivity and overall performance. One way of making your SLA speak to the sales team is to base it in units a sales person is most familiar with – dollars.
To calculate an SLA in dollars, take the percentage of the sales quota that marketing is responsible for each month – e.g., $200,000. Then, calculate the value of each Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to determine how many leads marketing must deliver to reach that total.
The importance of a Service-level Agreement (SLA) should never be overlooked. It is the SLA that formalizes the commitment sales and marketing teams make to meet shared goals for revenue growth.
It’s a two-way process: The marketing team commits to delivering a certain quantity and quality of leads each month to help the sales team meet its quota. The sales team then commits to follow up on those leads in a timely manner, and to make a specific number of contact attempts before abandoning the lead.
Sales and marketing teams often have a very different picture of the sales funnel. They might disagree about the number of stages a lead passes through before becoming a customer – and they often use different terminology to describe those stages.
To get the most out of your sales and marketing teams, they must have a unified picture of the funnel and standard definitions of each stage in the process. Without this, an alignment strategy isn’t possible.
The best way to reach your customers isn’t as obvious as it seems.
Just because one marketing channel is bringing views to your website doesn’t mean that it’s creating customers.
Knowing the difference between a winning and losing marketing channel can help you discover which sources are bringing in your most valuable customers.
Understanding the value of your marketing activities can be a real challenge.
There's nothing worse than spending money on marketing that doesn't drive any sales!
The good news is that a closed-loop reporting system can help you easily determine which lead sources (website, trade shows, cold calling, social media, etc.) bring in the best, most profitable customers.
Closed-loop marketing tracks a lead from its inception all the way to a sale.
Here's an example:
What does “Peripheral Vision” have in common with Sales and Marketing? As the CEO of The Weinbaum Group, I find the correct answer may be elusive. For context, it is essential.
The Background: I led more weekly B2B Sales Forecast Meetings than I care to recollect. These meetings are often speculative exercises; more “March Madness” tournament bracket and less fact-based projection. Too often, Sales Reps feel validated after white-boarding the names of several potential Strategic Accounts; i.e. Ford, Pepsi, GE, Kellogg’s, etc. In contrast, meaningful validation only comes with a signed contract. Something that rarely occurs as frequently, or as fast, as projected.
