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How can the sales team make marketing more effective? As we wrote last week, a stronger relationship between sales and marketing can improve the customer experience and your company’s bottom line. Unfortunately, many businesses do not foster teamwork between marketing and sales, and the two groups may not ask each other for the information they need most.
Marketers: it’s time to start a conversation with sales about your needs. Start asking your sales team for the following:
Customer intelligence
What are prospects and customers saying in the field? What do they want and need? Sales staff speak directly to leads daily, while marketers rarely do. The sales team learns what closes deals, and conversely, what issues are deal breakers. Marketers have access to a wealth of customer data, but it can be used in even more powerful ways when paired with first-hand customer insights from sales.
Clear communication
If you don’t already have an effective CRM system in place, it’s time to band together with your sales team and talk to your company’s leadership about implementing one. When used correctly, a high-functioning CRM will provide both teams with clean, usable documentation of sales and marketing’s impact on leads at every stage of the sales cycle.
If your CRM isn’t capable of tracking every interaction with a lead, from their visits to your website and their interactions with your emails to their conversations with sales reps, it’s time to look for a better solution that will truly help you close the loop between marketing and sales. Marketo, Act-On, Pardot and HubSpot paired with Salesforce are a few of our preferred solutions.
Collaboration and teamwork
Conversations about sharing lead intelligence and improving CRM systems will go nowhere unless you first foster a truly collaborative relationship between sales and marketing. To begin making this kind of relationship a reality, you should plan to regularly check in with sales and discuss how your teams can better serve each other’s needs. When you do, make sure you’re providing something of value to the sales team, not just asking for the data and insights you need to strengthen your own work. Marketing/Sales collaboration is a two-way street. Improved collaboration between your two groups will grow over time as your teams see just how much they have to offer each other.
Read our upcoming posts to learn more about the marketing metrics that set up sales success and get more tips on establishing better communications between sales and marketing.
Photo credit: Xataka via Flickr Creative Commons
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The relationship between sales and marketing is a two-way street; the two departments affect each other in a multitude of ways. While marketing can provide sales with the qualified leads they need to develop business, sales can provide marketing with the data, analytics and from-the-field insights they need to create and execute more effective campaigns.
On Wednesday, we discussed how marketing impacts sales. Today we’re flipping the equation to take a closer look at how sales impacts marketing strategies and tactics.
Lead Qualification
Today, only one in two companies reports that their sales and marketing departments have a formal, shared definition of a qualified lead. The sales team is likely to have a better understanding of what deems a lead as qualified than anyone else in the company, and they need to share guidance on this matter with marketing so that lead qualification can be measured more accurately. When sales shares insights about the kinds of contacts they want to receive, the marketing team can optimize its efforts to deliver more of that type of lead.
Refilling the Marketing Funnel
At almost any company, you’ll find a subset of leads that were at one time promising but have since grown cold. These leads shouldn’t just sit with the sales team, untended. Instead, they should be passed back to marketing for continued nurturing. The sales team can help marketing to identify cold, lost or old leads, and marketing can then step in to nurture those contacts in the hopes they will turn warm again in the future.
New Intelligence
Consistent communication with the sales team gives marketers valuable information into how their campaigns and tactics are performing. Because the sales department is talking directly with prospects on a daily basis, they are the ones who capture insights about everything from the reception of a new campaign to frustrations with the company website. This intelligence must be passed down to the marketing department so that marketing efforts can be continually improved upon based on customer feedback.
Marketers, let us know: how does the sales team at your company impact your success?
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Studies show that a failure to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies costs B2B companies 10% or more of their total revenue per year. That’s $100 million for a billion dollar company. The case for better alignment is clear, but before significant improvements can be made, sales professionals and marketers both need to understand how their work impacts their counterparts on the other side.
Let’s break this down and first discuss a few of the ways marketing impacts sales.
Lead Quality
Targeted marketing, driven by insights derived from good data, helps deliver high-quality leads to the sales department. When the marketing team works as it should, utilizing data and analytics to determine which leads are most promising — and nurturing the ones who still need some warming up through emails and personalized content — they are able to funnel leads who are informed, educated and prepared to make a buying decision over to the sales team. By delivering qualified leads to the sales team and developing content that assuages various purchase objections the lead might have, the marketing team is able to shorten the sales cycle, and the cost per acquisition often decreases as well.
Lead Information
Today, 57% of the buyer’s journey is completed before the buyer ever talks to sales. Because of this, it’s essential for marketing content to provide potential customers with the information they need before they reach a salesperson. It’s equally important for the marketing team to glean information about the lead they’re nurturing and share that information with the sales team. Using a marketing and sales automation tool like Marketo, HubSpot or Pardot allows the marketing team to gain deep insights into each individual lead. Today, we don’t need to wait until a lead comes in contact with sales to learn about their pain points, needs, and budget constraints. That information can be captured through smart digital marketing.
Sales ROI
We’ve talked at length about how marketers need to use data and insights to prove their ROI outside of the their department, but it’s worth discussing the ways in which marketing can help the sales department boost their own ROI, as well. Today, 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospecting, contributing to lost productivity that, combined with wasted marketing budget, costs companies at least $1 trillion a year. At its worst, marketing can hinder the sales department’s ability to do its job by supplying subpar leads that will only result in wasted time. At its best, marketing can optimize sales efficiency by providing qualified leads and lead intelligence that help sales close deals faster and easier than ever before.
Marketers, let us know: how are you aligning your work with the sales team, and what impact are you seeing as a result?
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Do your company’s marketing and sales teams work in partnership?
Throughout the month of June, we’ll be exploring the importance of sales and marketing alignment and its impact on revenue and business growth. Looking for tips on making the case for improved communication and collaboration between these two crucial departments? Here are several of the most important reasons to do so:
Alignment Improves the Customer Experience
B2B buyers are responsible for decisions that impact entire organizations. Purchasing decisions are made over time on the basis of careful research, not on impulse. Marketing guides potential buyers through the first part of the funnel, offering educational resources and building demand, while sales closes deals. But the customer should never be able to sense that they’re being handed off from the marketing phase of the buying process to the sales phase. The transition should be seamless and natural. When sales and marketing work together effectively, they create an engaging, consistent customer experience that ultimately results in an improved lead to close ratio.
Alignment Makes Everyone More Knowledgeable and More Effective
Sales teams have a lot to learn from marketing teams, and vice versa. For example, marketing can share insights about the pain points of prospective customers gleaned through marketing data and analytics, and sales can share information about which tactics demonstrate the most success at converting leads. Both departments can optimize their efforts as a result of this shared knowledge.
Alignment Improves the Bottom Line
Ultimately, the single most important benefit of sales and marketing alignment is that it improves the bottom line. When your brand’s sales and marketing departments truly function as a team, each contributes more to the growth of the business. What could be more important than that?
Small changes, such as introducing a new CRM or starting a weekly sales/marketing collaboration meeting, can go a long way in the quest to create a company culture in which marketing and sales truly function as a team. Keep reading our blog throughout the month to learn more about how to foster alignment between these two crucial components of your company.
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As any marketer knows, there is a great deal of work that goes on behind-the-scenes leading up to a campaign launch. Fortunately, as we’ve gained access to more and better data, we’ve been able to work smarter, not harder during our recent campaign launches. Guesswork has gone out the window in favor of data-driven planning and preparation. Here are a few ways you can utilize data to make your next campaign launch more effective.
Use Data to Determine Start Dates and Time
There’s plenty of data about the best dates and times to launch a campaign, but what’s best for someone else may not be ideal for your brand. Use your own analytics to understand your buyers, their digital habits and their buying cycles in order to decide on a date and time that is going to be most beneficial to start your campaign. While you’re at it, communicate with the sales department in order to understand what times are best for them to reach potential customers and leads, and make sure your timing is aligned with their needs.
Remember that the different elements of your campaign may require different start dates and times in order to maximize their efficacy. The customers you’re reaching via your social media efforts may have different online habits and buying cycles than those you’re reaching through your email campaigns, so be sure to differentiate your timing to align with the needs of your different audiences.
Maximize Initial Momentum
Once a campaign officially launches, it’s essential to start collecting data right away on how people are interacting with its components. Those early days of a campaign are when you have the best chance of maximizing its initial momentum, so be sure you’re keeping up on what’s working and what’s not and then readjusting your strategy accordingly. Communicate your insights to the sales team and others who are involved in the campaign as well so they can leverage them in their work.
Leverage the A/B Test
Today, there is no excuse for launching a campaign to a massive audience before first testing it on a smaller one. A/B test every element of your campaign with a small test audience, and maintain only the components that perform best in your larger launch.
Let us know: how are you gearing up for your next launch?
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It’s hard to believe that we’re almost finished with the second quarter of 2015. With only one more month to go, it’s essential to begin thinking about how you’re going to prove your marketing ROI in the next quarterly meeting. If you’ve been working on improving the predictability of your campaigns, demonstrating a current and future return on investment will be a much easier feat.
Why is campaign predictability so important to proving your ROI?
Predictability = Smarter Choices
It’s no secret that we believe the best marketing campaigns are built around data. Data allows us to to evaluate the market climate and buyer habits, track campaign performance in real time and make adjustments accordingly. But data can help us do more than simply determine the ROI of a current campaign. It can also help us predict the success of future campaigns based on insights about how similar efforts have performed in the past. With this knowledge at our disposal, we can make smarter choices and better marketing investments to maximize ROI in the future.
Predictability = Accountability
Predicting the performance of a campaign now keeps us accountable to its success in the future. When we use data to demonstrate our predictions for how a new lead gen program, content effort or email campaign will perform, we’re telling those who oversee our work what they can expect from us and helping them understand our success.
Predictability = Proactivity
At the end of the day, your C-Suite is focused on two things: driving growth in the present and maximizing opportunities for growth in the future. When you demonstrate that you’re dedicated to both optimizing marketing performance today, and improving it tomorrow, you show that you’re a proactive thinker who is just as concerned with maximizing future growth as the rest of the C-Suite.
Marketers, let us know: how are you using your predictions to prove your marketing ROI?
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On Friday, we discussed common mistakes marketers make when attempting to predict campaign success. Such mistakes can set your marketing efforts back, but they don’t have to cause a disaster. When an incorrect prediction or assumption leads your campaign down the wrong path, it’s still possible to rework the existing strategy to improve results.
When a campaign is struggling to live up to the expectations you set for it, consider the following:
Where are Leads Lost?
Compare your campaign projections to your actual results at every phase of the buyer’s journey. Is there a particular point at which leads are most often lost? Aim to find the weak link in the campaign. Then, instead of scrapping the entire program, you can make a small but effective change where it is needed most.
Is Data Consistent Across Platforms?
Take another look at each set of analytics you collect. Where do they tell a cohesive story about your audience’s response to your campaign, and where do inconsistencies exist? If the analytics from two platforms tell very different stories, you will need to retarget your messaging on the poorly performing channels. For example, if your email campaign is performing exceedingly well on desktop operating systems, but has low click rates on mobile, you may need to consider developing a second, mobile-optimized version of each of your emails so that your messages can become as effective on mobile as they are on desktop.
Is the Budget Sufficient?
Sometimes, we convince ourselves that we can do more with less. We set budgets that are not sufficient to meet the goals of our campaigns because we believe in the engagement of our networks or the creativity of our ideas. If your campaign is failing to live up to expectations, it may be time to reevaluate the budget you’re putting into it and invest a bit more to get your message in front of a larger or more targeted audience.
If you’ve been using data and analytics since you began to plan your campaign, these questions should be easy to answer and adjustments should help you get back on track. What does your team look at first when a campaign doesn’t live up to expectations?
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Are there common miscalculations in predicting marketing outcomes? Unfortunately, the answer is yes. In this post, we’re examining commonly overlooked KPIs, signs you’re losing sight of your marketing goal and missed opportunities that marketers need to take heed of when working to predict a campaign’s results.
Failing to Align Tactics With the Mission and Goals
A marketing manager may be doing everything right in tracking all their tactics, but the campaign might still fail. Why? It’s easy to get down in the weeds and lose sight of the larger picture: aligning operations to the overall goal of the campaign and the business mission.
At Movéo, we ensure that before a campaign begins, we have a strong idea of what we want our end goal to be, and that our goal is measurable and timely. Once we have that goal outlined, we work backward to identify the metrics we need to measure to illustrate throughout the campaign how we’re progressing, and then develop supporting tactics. By working backwards, it’s easier to ensure that all tactics are aligned to your central goal.
If you fail to align your strategies and tactics with an overarching campaign goal, you end up losing focus. If you find yourself in this position in the middle of a campaign, work to reframe and refocus as quickly as you can.
Not Keeping Analytics Actionable
Data and analytics provide invaluable information on how a campaign is performing. However, data is only effective when it’s used as a starting point for action. If you’re simply tracking the efficacy of operations without taking steps to constantly improve based on what you’re learning, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
Ensure that all of your analytics are actionable. Take heed of what your analytics are telling you, and work with your marketing team to stay agile so that you can optimize your campaign based on what the data tells you.
Seeking “Purified” Data
You don’t need pristine data sets to glean actionable insights; raw data can be just as useful in getting a sense of how effective your work is.
In order to avoid getting bogged down trying to refine data, make analytics as broadly useable as you can. If you need more information, don’t be afraid to look at past marketing efforts.
Let us know: what are some mistakes you’ve made when creating a data and analytics-centered marketing strategy?
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How do you measure the efficiency of your marketing team? It’s often noticeable when efficiency increases or drops, but it’s difficult to quantify. However, it’s essential to track internal metrics and processes if you want your marketing efforts to continue to reach new levels of success.
A huge part of ensuring marketing strategy success is being able to predict how a marketing team will operate. Today, we’re discussing three metrics you should rely on to glean important information about how your team will work together and how efficiently work will get done.
Frequency of Work Interruptions
Your team needs to be able to work steadily and uninterrupted in order to maximize efficiency. If they’re repeatedly interrupted by outside issues, they’ll be unable to do their jobs as well. As a manager, it’s important to make sure that your team has the time management skills needed to handle interruptions as they occur and to work to prevent them before they even happen.
To measure the frequency of work interruptions, ensure that every member of your team is keeping track of their time using a time tracking tool like Harvest or Tick. Moreover, make sure they’re noting when a task gets interrupted to work on something else. Not only does this allow you a full picture of which tasks take the most time, but it allows you to see the length of time each member spends remedying an interruption.
On-time Delivery Rate
Are elements of your campaign coming in late? If so, it’s likely impeding the progression of other operations. Keep track of when your team is delivering work late, and analyze the situation to determine why work is not being delivered in a timely manner. It may be that the work is overly difficult, expectations are too high or the assignment can be streamlined to take less time and deliver the same results.
Keeping track of how efficiently your team is able to deliver assets also keeps you accountable to your end date and overall campaign timeline. By knowing how long it takes to deliver different campaign elements, you’ll better be able to plan and predict how long it will take to deliver similar items in the future.
Percent of Campaign Completion
In order to increase predictability, you need to keep track of how far you are to campaign completion. Not only should you track completed milestones, but also budget spend and recorded hours in order to identify where you’re wasting time and what’s working well as you build your campaign. In the process, you may recognize ways to make your work more efficient, either through restructuring your team, bringing in external consultants to handle specific campaign elements, or both.
Keeping track of the progression of your campaigns and milestone metrics will also help you stay accountable to higher-ups in the marketing department and your company as a whole. When they ask for a snapshot of your progress, you’ll have an accurate view of where things stand.
Let us know: how are you keeping your marketing team efficient and accountable to data?
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As a marketer, you must always strive to better understand customer habits and predict how prospects will react to your marketing efforts. But how?
Data and analytics can help your team better understand buyer personas and buying habits, give you the ability to rework strategies and tactics to adapt to your customers’ buying cycle, and maximize predictability. Digital tools also offer new opportunities to learn about customers and improve efforts to reach them. In order to effectively use the information you gather, think strategically about the metrics you measure and what they mean, and then try these tips.
Improve Buyer Personas
Social media data and web analytics offer your company a wealth of buyer insights. Use the demographic and psychographic information, including age, gender, and interests provided by tools like Facebook Page Insights, Google Analytics, and Twitter Analytics to reshape your buyer personas. Who is really engaging with your content, and who is following through to make a purchase? What do these people care about most?
If your firm is still using buyer personas created from guesses about your target audience, it’s time to make updates. Digital campaigns yield engagement and conversion information that can tell you more about your real potential buyers than any brainstorming session.
Understand Buying Habits
Sales-based metrics are key to understanding buying habits. Track how interactions across campaigns and platforms have led to the development of sales qualified leads (SQLs). Use data from past campaigns to set marketing goals and evaluate marketing performance.
Your company can also consult secondary marketing research to learn more about buying habits across your industry. Combine these insights with your own data for a holistic picture of your audience and how to best reach potential buyers.
Adapt Your Marketing Efforts to the Buying Cycle
Digital tools have changed marketing. Stop relying on outdated ideas about the buying cycle, including the “rules and tools” that defined marketing best practices for so long. According to Forrester Research, a B2B buyer’s journey is often 90% over before sales is contacted, so expect to spend as much time proving your worth as you do educating them about your service. Employ social listening and engagement and advanced analytics to learn about what your customers and potential customers need, and when they need it. Then, message around those needs.
It’s time to get smarter about how you reach those with purchasing power. Improved predictability can help your company efficiently connect with and influence the buyers who matter. How are you putting data to work?
