For most marketers the benefits of sales and marketing alignment are pretty clear – but actually making it happen when you’re running a campaign is no easy task. Paul Everett, director of marketing strategy at The Marketing Practice, talks us through six simple steps you can take to ensure everyone’s pushing in the same direction
You often hear marketers complaining that ‘we hand leads over to sales and nothing happens with them’. Assuming that these are good opportunities in the right organisations, the difference can come down to how well engaged sales were with the campaign. Do they know how the leads were generated and qualified? Do they know what content converted these leads? Do they have the relevant materials to help them run meetings or follow up with the leads?
It’s also important from the perspective of your prospects. Does the handover to your sales team feel like a natural continuation of the journey that your marketing campaign took them on? Does the sales meeting or call live up to the promises that your marketing made in terms of the value they would get from taking this next step?
The six steps to getting your sales team fully on board
1. Make sure that marketing is pitching what sales are selling – and vice versa
There’s often tension between marketing’s desire to campaign around strategic business issues and big ‘solutions’ that shift the audience’s perception of a company’s offerings, and sales’ need to be out pitching things that they know people can buy, the company can deliver and they are comfortable selling. In reality, both sides can learn from each other and there is usually a happy medium where elements of the campaign can be pitching the big vision and providing sales with materials to be more comfortable in strategic conversations, while also creating ‘point’ sales opportunities around specific products/solutions. But unless you work with sales upfront to agree this ‘happy medium’, don’t expect them to be effortlessly engaged by the ‘opportunities’ that your campaigns deliver.
It’s about mixing an ‘outside-in’ approach (aligning campaigns to audience needs) with the best elements of the traditional ‘inside-out’ approach (running campaigns around what your business is best at and where you have a track record).
2. Use the sales team as a source of messaging and content
Marketing often turns to product teams, customers or even external analysts for input when creating content and messaging plans. But running sessions with sales can also be highly productive – both in terms of ideas for content and messages, and also in ensuring that sales feel part of the campaign from the start. Here are some good questions to ask your salespeople:
- Who is your best customer? What makes them unique?
- Can you talk through some recent deals that you’ve won? How did they come in as a prospect? Why did we win?
- And some deals that you’ve lost – why did we lose? Who/what did they go with instead?
- What alternatives do prospects have? What solutions do they typically have in place, what are the consequences of doing nothing, what’s the competitive landscape?
- Are there any specific elements of the overall solution that you use as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to open up wider deals?
- What kind of questions/issues are buyers typically struggling with in the first sales meetings?
- What do you typically talk through in your first sales meetings?
- If you were approaching someone ‘cold’ and making the case about why they should meet you, what would you say?
- Are there any resources/presentations that you think work best as leave-behinds/prompts that move people along the sales process?
3. Properly define what makes a ‘lead’ relevant to sales
It’s not just about handing over BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timescale) qualified leads to sales. Sales may actually want something completely different – a smaller number of earlier stage opportunities with named accounts, coupled with better market intelligence and relationships for the future. Try to:
- Uncover potential opportunities within named accounts that sales weren’t actively working.
- Build intelligence across all named accounts and strengthen relationships with decision-makers.
- Nurture the wider addressable market with the goals of building a long-term reputation and mapping the potential for future years to support a re-alignment of the sales team.
4. Understand what resources sales are really using
We need to understand what assets and resources sales will find most useful both to generate their own meetings and use during/after the meetings that are booked.
We researched 10 salespeople from one of our clients and these were their top four requests:
- More proactive content about where the company is going in the future – a video or one sheet summary.
- Fewer, more targeted presentations with standard templates.
- Information on competitors and how they are better (supported with examples).
- More case studies and creative examples.
5. Brief sales on the campaign plan, calls-to-action and content
And keep briefing them as the rollout happens. Include links to relevant campaigns/content with leads that are handed over so they can see the materials that prospects have already received. Also, supply ideas of presentations they can use for their next steps.
On a recent European campaign we even included a tool that helped sales search for relevant content or tools according to the kind of meeting they were going to.
6. And, of course, use your sales and account teams as a channel to market
Leverage the social media profile of the sales team; they can pull through blogs and SlideShare presentations to their LinkedIn profiles, and you can prompt them with ideas of content/views to share on Twitter or in LinkedIn groups.
In summary, for every external campaign there’s an equivalent internal programme to engage sales that is just as important. You can generate all the leads in the world, but if sales aren’t engaged or equipped to follow them up then it can easily come to nothing.