Sales Teams and Marketing Teams are on the hook for a lot. Their responsibilities are actually too long to list here. Because of this, the relationship between the sales and marketing departments typically falls by the wayside. That’s understandable. However, if marketing and sales are not in synch, overall success for each team and their organization suffers.
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It should be noted that activities of both marketing and sales should lead to one thing: revenue for the company. Sales can only be effective with the help of marketing and marketing will only be relevant with sales.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, a disconnect between marketing and sales can result in 60% to 70% of content becoming useless. And, without having the same goals, sales then chases after 79% of marketing leads that ultimately lead nowhere.
While it may require some work for both teams to align their strategies and assist each other at weak points, it should be noted that organizations where sales and marketing teams work together have higher customer retention rates, higher sales win rates, faster growth, and faster profit growth.
In this article we’ll examine the marketing/sales relationship from the marketing perspective. Here are three ways to measure whether marketing understands sales:
Sales Lead Acceptance
There’s truly no question here, the amount and quality of leads marketing passes to sales is the number one definer for success within their work. If that’s the case, why wouldn’t they take ownership over those leads? The best way to approach this is to pull the data on the marketing leads that have converted to sales opportunities. From there, you can gather consistencies on what’s working and what’s not, and duplicate those across further campaigns. This helps with the golden nugget of marketing data- ROI projections.
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Predictable Revenue
The best defense against the decline of marketing engagement by prospects is a strong sales outreach. This can be said over and over again, but if sales and marketing are not working hand in hand, it creates a major gap in revenue. Knowing that, what’s the best way to prove that marketing is successful? Predictable revenue. The mindset behind this is for marketing to track all the leads that have been in their nurture, and by examining trends in your reporting, analyze when they’ll convert to a sales lead. Once that happens, and if they understand the sales process for the company, marketing can then project when the lead will become an opportunity. By providing a predictable revenue report to sales, marketing not only shows that what they’re doing is working, but further strengthening the line of trust and communication.
Customer Marketing
What is the optimal result of marketing efforts? Creating natural advocacy. Having a client or prospect spread the word of what your business does, and how it’s helping them one of the many tenets to success. How do you get there? Customer marketing. In a customer marketing strategy, the goal is land and expand. It’s 25% more profitable to retain a current customer than it is to onboard a new one. Why does this matter to sales? By customizing outreach to current clients, marketing builds awareness and value within that target account, in turn sets the stage for new sales opportunities. There is about a 60-70% probability that a current client will buy from you again, and those are stats that neither marketing nor sales can ignore. Creating a strong customer marketing strategy and aligning it with sales will help you increase revenue over time.
After reading this, it’s possible that your initial response is “Well that seems like a lot of work,” and it certainly is. However, learning to prove the effectiveness of marketing efforts to the sales department, and the rest of the organization, helps create a fully-functional revenue powerhouse.
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