When it comes to love-hate relationships, that of marketing and sales takes the cake. Scratch that – it takes the whole bakery.
It’s no secret that these two departments have a tradition of being at odds with one another, but if you’ve had any experience with managing marketing and sales teams, you know just how difficult it can be trying to make them get along.
The fact is that some things can’t be forced, especially when both parties have legitimate reasons to feel the way they do. On the one hand, marketers often feel their efforts are undervalued. They spend hours every day developing beautiful designs and catchy slogans to draw in potential customers, but when a lead finally decides to make a purchase, credit often goes immediately to the salesperson who closed the deal.
On the other hand, sales teams feel the leads that get passed to them are often unqualified. Once leads have been in the pipeline for a certain amount of time, marketing might deem them qualified and “throw them over the fence” before they’re ready to make a purchase, leaving sales frustrated with lower conversion rates.
If you’re a manager, you’re often so focused on making sure each team is doing its best internally, you forget to foster cooperation between teams. However, bridging the gap between sales and marketing can have a hugely positive impact – not only for company-wide efficiency and cooperation but also for effectiveness of the teams’ internal operations. So while it may seem a near impossible feat, getting your marketing and sales departments to play nice can go a long way for your company’s bottom line.
Competing for Business in the Modern Digital Age
Marketing and sales teams have traditionally worked in a somewhat disjointed fashion, focusing on their respective tasks and keeping collaboration minimal. Marketers are concerned with creating great content and building brand awareness, while salespeople work on honing their persuasive skills and converting as many leads as they can. When the two teams do communicate, it usually revolves around transitioning a lead from marketing to sales, which is often where the trouble starts.
Until pretty recently, this approach (though not ideal) still worked. As long as a company had great marketers and salespeople, it didn’t matter as much whether they got along with each other.
Times have changed, however, and businesses are finding that having good content and a quality product or service is no longer enough to keep up with the competition.
Increasingly consumers are demanding information and services that address their highly specific wants and needs, and they’re quick to dismiss anything they deem even slightly irrelevant. They’re more informed than ever about what’s available to them, which means they probably know what they want way before you reach out to them. It also means that the buying cycle is longer, as people are taking their time to do research before making any decisions.
So what does all this mean for your business?
It means that if your marketing and sales teams are not in sync at all times, your customers won’t be getting exactly what they need, exactly when they need it, and they’ll quickly start leaving you for better options.
To ensure this doesn’t happen, you’ve got to develop a strategy for targeting leads and customers at precisely the right points in the decision process, and that requires getting your sales and marketing teams on the same page. Rather than bombarding your audience with generic ads and cold calls, your teams need to work together to capture people’s interest and keep them engaged over the long term.
If you’re wondering how you can get your marketing and sales teams to put aside their differences and work in harmony, then look no further than marketing automation. By providing a platform for tracking and measuring operations, marketing automation takes subjectivity out of the process and improves visibility and communication within and among teams.
Marketing Automation to the Rescue
You’ve probably heard that marketing automation can provide a number of benefits for your business. From maximizing operational oversight to improving your ROI, it seems there isn’t anything the software can’t do.
It streamlines your marketing and sales processes and automates many tedious and time-consuming tasks, freeing up your team members to focus their energy on the creative work that can’t be automated.
In a nutshell, marketing automation allows your marketing and sales teams to:
- Gather valuable information so you can capture the most qualified leads
- Build targeted lists based on lead activities and information
- Engage with leads through multiple media channels to optimize your reach and appeal
- Track and measure online and offline activities to get a complete picture of your leads
- Use lead scoring to segment your lists as leads interact with your brand and content over time
- Automatically alert sales right when a lead becomes ready to make a purchase
- Keep your “warm” leads actively engaged through longer-term nurturing campaigns
- Analyze the performance of your marketing and sales tactics to see what’s working
Marketing automation allows marketers to capture the most qualified leads and nudge them gently down a well-structured sales pipeline, targeting them with relevant and personalized content at strategic points throughout the journey. As leads interact with your brand, their lead scores change to reflect engagement, so when they’re finally passed off to sales, there is no confusion as to their quality.
Additionally, marketing automation make it easy to measure the success of your campaign strategies. By tracking how leads interact with your content – from downloading whitepapers to sharing your social media posts – the software allows you to attribute each sale to a series of touch points, giving you a clear picture of what’s working and what’s not while also ensuring no one’s efforts go unaccounted for.
Improving Lead Quality
A common source of conflict between marketing and sales is the inability to agree on what constitutes a “qualified” lead. Marketers might put what they consider to be a reasonable effort into nurturing leads over a certain period of time, and then deem them qualified at the end of that process regardless of how sales-ready they actually are.
Sometimes marketers put in less effort as a way to reduce their workloads, but most of the time they simply don’t have the means to effectively nurture leads, and genuinely believe they’re passing off ones that are qualified. Ultimately their intentions aren’t what is most important – if dead-end leads keep coming in, frustration on the sales side will continue to grow.
It is a two-way street, however, and sales people sometimes don’t do their own part to keep conversion rates up. If they presume that all or most of the leads they receive will be unqualified, they might end up dismissing or overlooking leads that actually are qualified, or they’ll put minimal efforts into converting them and end up losing deals that could have been won with a little more patience.
Lead scoring is an easy way to get your marketing and sales teams on the same page. Scores update dynamically based on the activities and engagement levels of your leads, so you know exactly when and how to reach out to them.
In order for lead scoring to work properly, you have to set up standards by which the system can generate scores. This is a great opportunity to get both sales and marketing to weigh in on what they think makes for a qualified lead. You can take a look at the various touch points you typically use to interact with leads and then decide as a group what combinations of touch points would reasonably cause a lead to become sales-ready.
Establishing definitions and standards not only feeds the marketing automation engine so it can run smoothly, but it also gives your team members some clear points of reference if there is ever any debate over a lead’s status.
Measuring Results
Before marketing automation, it was difficult to see what was driving leads to convert. As a result, sales were the primary measurement of a company’s success and sometimes appeared to be the only force driving business forward. In turn, marketers often struggled to get recognition for their efforts, and particularly to prove the ROI of their campaigns.
Marketing communication strategies are inextricably connected to end results, however, and marketing automation gives you a way to track and measure that. It tracks your every single move and then provides you with detailed analytics on how your campaigns are performing, so you can see what’s working and nix what’s not.
For example, you can look at all sales that occurred within a particular window of time and track them all back to their initial touch points. If you identify a social media post (or email, online ad, etc.) that drove a particularly high volume of traffic, you can attribute any sales that resulted from that traffic to the campaign associated with the initial touchpoint.
Having full visibility of all of your efforts ensures that credit will be given where it’s due, which has enormous benefits for the relationship between sales and marketing. You can see what content people are viewing, how well they’re engaging with your social media, whether they’re attending your events, and more. Then, whenever a lead does convert, you can give credit to the salesperson who closed the deal as well as all the other people who were involved in moving the lead down the pipeline.
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
Marketing automation doesn’t just provide a platform for your teams to communicate with each other – it necessitates that communication and cooperation in order to work to its full potential.
Sales and marketing must agree on the standards by which they qualify leads, and they must each be willing to do their fair share to keep the engine running. Marketing is responsible for creating rich content and distributing it effectively across multiple channels. Sales must work hard to convert the leads that are passed to them and should be involved in longer term nurturing campaigns, actively checking in with leads and customers to keep them engaged over time.
When marketing and sales are on the same page, they optimize the effectiveness of their own efforts and of the marketing automation software. In turn, the software lifts some of the burden and make it much easier for sales and marketing to collaborate.
Both teams can easily view where a lead is in the pipeline to see what they can do to push him/her closer to making a purchase. Furthermore, automatic lead scoring and list segmentation save time on the marketing side, and automatic sales alerts ensure there will be no missed opportunity to close a deal.