How to Align your Marketing & Sales Processes for Qualified leads
Monday morning, 9 AM, people are tired and cranky. Suddenly, a bombshell. Marketing snaps at Sales: “We provide you with tons of leads and you can’t manage to follow up on them!”
Sales, clearly annoyed, bites back: “You guys spend loads of money on media campaigns without any sort of impact on our sales!”
What becomes painstakingly clear, is that the chemistry between these two units is essential to the success of the team.
In this calendar article, we explain how marketing & sales alignment can be achieved in order for frustrations to be avoided and revenue to grow significantly.
Yes, it’s profitable
There are five main reasons as to why implementing marketing & sales alignment is vital to your business. It will decrease costs, speed up the go-to-market process, increase employee happiness, increase efficiency, and increase revenue.
This is illustrated by a 2010 survey by the Aberdeen Group, which found that highly aligned organizations achieved an average of 32% annual revenue growth – while less well-aligned companies reported an average 7% decline in revenue.
Moreover, organisations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions enjoyed 36% higher customer retention rates (MarketingProfs).
Those are some stone-cold figures that should spike the attention of any marketing or sales professional.
Aligning departments means integrating
Concretely, alignment means that sales and marketing are working together in a coordinated effort to achieve the ultimate goal: revenue.
So how to go about aligning the departments? The solution lies in the integration of several aspects of business:
1. Integrate the activities and improve the communication:
• Set up and align definitions/targets/KPIs
• Integrate customer information
• Assess customer needs and analyse the top opportunities by segment
• Create a unified focus on the most valuable customers
• Develop strategic plans together
• Set up product planning together
• Generate value propositions (for different market segments)
• Check all advertising material and campaigns together
• Meet periodically to review and improve relations
2. Integrate the processes and systems
• Establish common reporting and metrics
• Develop lead generation process
• Develop CRM and/or other systems (e.a. mobile device)
• Design marketing and sales responsibilities
• Establish SLAs
• Set up control & communication platform
• Implement or adapt business processes
• Create reward systems to laud successful efforts (e.a. Sodexo)
3. Integrate the organisational structures
• Split Marketing into upstream and downstream teams
• Hire a chief revenue officer
• Bring the departments together
• Improve sales force feedback
• Require job rotations
• Adapt organisational structure for optimal alignment
Keep in mind the big picture
Of course, your alignment won’t fail if you don’t follow every single step of the aforementioned guidelines.
It’s more a case of ‘the more the better’, each part bringing you a little closer to the perfect Marketing & Sales alignment and to drastically improved business results.
