The Five Steps to Sales and Marketing Synergy

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The Five Steps to Sales and Marketing Synergy
Keeping Marketing and Sales on the same page leads to greater success.
Aligning sales and marketing is an Step 1: Tell 'Em What You're imperative in today's world of the Going To Doempowered buyer. There has been Sales needs to understand your plans much written about aligning around and forecast so their expectations are leads.but this is only part of the issue set correctly on the type of marketing and will lead to trouble down the road if activities you will conduct and the you don't address the whole issue. We target audiences you will pursue. There offer these five steps to help marketers needs to be a common understanding get on the road to success in the of the volume of activity and how relationship with sales. they can participate and even initiate marketing activities to drive business and opportunities in their territories. Without an understanding of your marketing goals and plans, sales will not be able to put together meaningful territory plans. We all know that marketing doesn't initiate all sales opportunities. Without the forecast and plans, sales will not know how much is expected from their own direct efforts and partner efforts.
Step 2: Make Sales a Part of MarketingThe roles are blurring as marketing communicates deep into the pipeline and sales returns prospects to nurturing campaigns. This can be a disaster of sales and marketing stepping on each other, or can be a powerful combination if your sales team is empowered to work within the bounds of the marketing plans. This starts with collaborative planning by involving sales personnel in your go-to-market campaign online and live event attendance, development process. Then, you downloads of marketing materials, or need to define the guidelines for sales viewing videos. Their behavior not only initiating marketing communications indicates interest, it indicates where and provide a means for sales to return they are in the buying cycle (awareness, a prospect to marketing for further education, evaluation, purchase for nurturing. You need to give sales control example.) over how you message to prospects in the sales pipeline and your existing Once you agree on attributes, you need customers by allowing them to set to agree on what level of quality is preferences from their Sales Force sufficient to hand the lead to sales. Do Automation tool. they need all attributes to be known or are some of them sufficient. This Step 3: Show Them What You Are varies by the product(s) you are selling, Doing the staffing of marketing versus sales, We discussed the importance of whether you have telemarketing or providing visibility to plans and not, and the culture of the company. forecasts. You need to back this up These discussions will drive a lead with visibility to the dynamic calendar score plan that gives different points of activities in marketing. As we all to the attributes and behaviors of know, marketing's calendar is constantly your prospects. Lead scoring can be changing.new things get added, things structured simply with one set of rules get dropped and things move. Your that are applied to all prospects or sales team needs an easy way to access your business may be more complex the calendar so they know when email requiring different lead scoring rule sets campaigns drop, when events are for different types of prospects based scheduled and when the road show on product line interest, geography or is scheduled. In addition, you should even buying stage. Regardless, you add your sales team to the seed list need to spend time in this definition for your campaigns. This can serve and then allow for updates and changes two functions. First, they can provide as you learn how your plan works and feedback on the campaign delivery and capacity changes.content and receiving the campaign will serve as an alert that it is going But don't just stop at setting up your out to their prospects and customers. lead scoring structure and hand-off. They are a key conduit for successful Once you have this in place, you need marketing events and they can provide a communication vehicle to keep your important follow up to campaigns sent sales team informed as prospects to prospects in the pipeline or existing continue to interact with you in later customers. stages of the buying cycle. Provide alerts when an individual or c... [download for more]