Check out the slides from a webinar from Marketo on simple ways to increase your sales and marketing alignment - for better conversions, ROI and revenue!
10 Tips For Effective Sales and Marketing Alignment
1. 10 Tips for Effective Sales and
Marketing Alignment
Jessica Langensand
Pre-Sales Solutions Consultant
Lizzy Funk
Marketing Program Manager
2. • This webinar is being recorded! Slides and recording will
be sent to you later today
• Questions? Type your question in the chat box for the
live Q&A at the end
• Posting to social?
#mktgnation
@jlangensand
@lizzymfunk
Housekeeping
11. • Meet frequently
• Upcoming campaigns and
reports
• Analyze trends and results
• Forecast results
• Provide feedback
• Lead quality
• Campaign needs/ideas
1. Communication
Think about sales and marketing as one team
12. • Segments and Verticals
• Ex. What to say post-
healthcare campaign
• Mock Calls
• More at-bats = better
prepared
• Make it fun!!
2. Training
13. Less than HALF of companies have agreed upon definitions
of a qualified lead
3. Align on Goals
14. 3. Align on Goals
• TOFU ‘Top of the Funnel’
• New Name
• Engaged
• MOFU ‘Middle of the
Funnel’
• Marketing Qualified Lead
(MQL)
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
• BOFU ‘Bottom of the
Funnel’
• Opportunity
• Customer
15. • Provide sales with specific content for each conversation
and/or follow up
• Demographic – executives vs. practitioners, ENT vs. SMB, B2B
vs. B2B
• Behavior – interest in certain topic, recent engagements
• Stage – early stage vs. late stage
• Train on who, what, when, where, why, how to use content
4. Content
95% of buyers chose a solution provider that provided them with ample
content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process
DemandGen Report
16. 5. Clean Up That Data!
Data is changing constantly!
17. • Quality vs. Quantity
• Is marketing spend
generating opps?
• Which campaigns are
helping sales? Which are
not?
• Goals – MQLs, SQLs,
Opportunities
6. Create Accountability (for
Marketing)
20. Who They Are AND What They Do
Behavior
- Opens, Clicks
- Page Visits
- eBook Downloads
- Event Attendance
- Watched Demo
Demographic
- Revenue
- Industry
- Employee Size
- Job Title
- Country
21. When to Decay Score
- Inactivity (ex. Hasn’t opened email in over 3
months)
- Not the right country/industry for your
product/service
- Looking at your careers page
- Unsubscribed
23. • Prioritize Leads for Sales
• Pass All Marketing Data Over
Seamlessly
• See How Sales is Following Up
• Give Them Insight and Tools for
Success
8. Connect Your CRM with Marketing
Automation
24. “Have you heard of Marketo?” vs. “Saw you stopped by
our booth in New Orleans last month”
Relevant Conversations Start with
Relevant Information
25. • Ways to Automate:
• Triggers
• Visited registration page, did not register
• Showed interest in specific topic
• Alerts/Notifications
• Late stage activity – visiting pricing page, registering for demo, etc…
• Engagement – visited website 5 times in one week, etc…
• Campaigns for sales to use
• Closed-Lost Campaign
• Drip Campaigns – by vertical or competition or role
9. Automate EVERYTHING
26. • What to Measure?
• For Social or PPC, might be new names. For Webinars, it’s
revenue influenced. How do you see both?
• When to Measure?
• The tradeshow you went to last month won’t have immediate
results on sales. How long do you wait?
• Compare All Touchpoints
• At least 7 touches move someone from a cold lead to a hot
one, which touchpoint worked best?
10. Conduct ROI Analysis
29. 1. Communication
2. Training
3. Align on Goals
4. Content
5. Clean Up That Data
6. Create Accountability
7. Develop a Lead Scoring
Model
8. Connect Your CRM with
Marketing Automation
9. Automate Everything
10. Conduct ROI Analysis
10 Tips
Thanks for joining us today! We’re excited to talk to you about sales and marketing alignment. My name is Lizzy and I am a marketing programs manager at Marketo. We also have Jessica Langensand here with us. She is a Pre-Sales Solutions Consultant at Marketo. She will provide great insight into both sides of how alignment works. She started out in Marketing and moved into sales.
Before we get started, here are some housekeeping notes.
So let’s start off – why should we even care about alignment between sales and marketing?
Even marketing is tied to revenue. No, they are not on the phones closing deals. But their job is just as important – passing the right quality and quantity of leads to sales to close the deals. So both teams are focused on generating revenue. You can see the chart on the right that according to marketing professionals, their number one object is increasing revenue. So if sales and marketing’s goals are the same – then both teams have to be on the same page in order to achieve those goals.
We’ve got a few more stats to make sure you believe us on how important it actually is!
Without effective alignment between sales and marketing sales can spend up to half of their time on unproductive prospecting . This can include calling the wrong leads, calling unqualified or not ready leads, not knowing the right talk track when talking to different buyer personas and so on. This can be incredibly ineffective and frustrating for sales
Another stat for you. Without effective alignment, sales can ignore up to 80% of marketing generated leads. This can be incredibly frustrating for marketing to be putting in all of their budget and campaigns and hard work into generating these leads for sales to ignore them. Again this is where alignment comes in to helping generating the right leads with the right quality and right quantity.
With alignment – this reality won’t be true!
Does this look familiar?
So misalignment is not good.
And WITH alignment you can:
Increase revenue
Shorten sales cycle
Improve conversion rates
And validate your forecast accuracy
So overall, you can increase productivity and increase your close rate by 67%
So let’s go over 10 tips for sales and marketing alignment.
The first tip is communication. So we don’t end up like this.
It is best to think about sales and marketing as one team – not two separate teams. Especially because both teams are going after the same end goal.
So here at Marketo, here are some ways we ensure we are both on the same page:
Meet frequently
We meet every other week and we also send email communications out weekly to go over what campaigns are coming up, how they can help in conversations, as well as reports showing which leads have engaged with specific campaigns for follow up
It is good to go over and uncover new trends and results. Being open about results will only make both teams better. In our meetings with sales, we’ll show where we are against our goals – whether we are hitting them or not. And vice versa.
It is also good to meet to go over what future numbers you expect to hit. This can help you decide if marketing needs to run new specific campaigns to help hit the number.
It is also important to provide feedback to both teams, whether that means discussing lead quality – whether it is good or bad. It is also great to listen to sales to get new campaign ideas or needs. Afterall, they are the ones on the phone all day – so they know more than marketing does what prospects are struggling with or want, etc…
The second tip is training.
This goes both ways – for sales and marketing.
For marketing, they need to be trained on what a good lead looks like.
For sales, they need to be trained on how to follow up with leads to close the deal
And for both – the goal is generating new business.
Here are some examples of training that we do here at Marketo:
For specific segments or verticals – training sales on how to follow up with those leads – whether that is providing call scripts or reports of leads to follow up on.
Mock calls – this is a great tactic especially for new sales reps. Getting on the phone is scary – so mock calls will give sales team members more confidence to hit the phone and start closing deals!
The 3rd tip is aligning on goals.
Less than half of all companies have agreed upon definitions of a qualified lead.
Think about it – if I were to go ask your sales manager what a qualified lead looks like – would they have the same answer as you?
It is important to be on the same page for definitions of your goals.
Here are some terms you should be aligned on:
Content is the key to success.
In fact, 95% of buyers chose a solution provider that provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process.
And content is not just used in marketing. Content should be used by sales to close deals too.
But part of the alignment includes on which content sales should use when for conversations.
Dirty data can include – duplicates, incorrect information, spammy information, old information, etc…
The Gartner Group reports that poor data quality depletes millions of dollars annually (on average) in wasted resources and expenses on operational inefficiencies, missed sales and unrealized new opportunities.
Keep you data clean to make sure :
For marketing – personalized and segmented campaigns work and are accurate for the recipient
For sales – they are not wasting time following up on bad leads, etc…
How to: Define the standards for complete and normalized records and manage how the database grows and where records come from. Define the minimum standards for deliverability rates. Establish requirements for data providers.
At Marketo we have these in place and it is all automated.
So when a lead becomes a lead, if after the first day they haven’t touched it, they get a nice incredibly friendly reminder. And you can see from this slides the reminders get less friendly.
As you can imagine, there are very few leads that aren’t followed up within a 3-day period. And by the way, some leads are followed up much more quickly.
Now, this may seem a bit harsh, but hey, that’s an SDR’s job. Their primary mission is to call and qualify our best leads and pass them to an AE if they think an opportunity exists.
After a deal ends whether it is a win or a loss, how can sales share that information with marketing? How can marketing use that information?
- It is great to use this information in marketing. We look at the data that shows why a deal was lost – was it to competition, no sale, etc… We can use this data to help find trends such as a certain program generated a lot of deals that won – what was different and how can we do that again. With CRM and Marketing Automation – you can train the sales team to input this information in specific fields that maps it back to marketing automation platforms.
What does your lead pass off process look like?
Marketing MQL at a certain score SDR calls SQL AE to qualify Opp Customer
We only have a team of 5 sales people, do you think this would still be helpful for them?
Which CRMs does the integration between MA and CRMs work?