Seamlessly integrating marketing and sales may seem like a Utopian idea but a high percentage of companies would find their revenues skyrocketing if this ‘utopian’ idea were to materialise. I would like to share some of my critical aspects to keep in mind when integrating marketing and sales.
“Highly aligned organisations across sales and marketing achieve an average of 32% annual revenue growth.”
Unify your go-to-market strategy
Companies have a set of integrated strategies in place to woo its targeted customer profile. They develop organisational processes to ensure customers are smoothly (and linearly) made to pass through, right from their first point of interaction to the point of sale.
If these go-to-market plans are worked on by the sales and the marketing teams simultaneously, and they go about answering some of the below-mentioned topics/questions together, we may be on our way towards that ‘utopian’ integration.
Things to consider:
- Value proposal workshop/ tool kit built on a story-telling approach that makes sales conversations go-to-customer (GTC) for each buying cycle stage?
- How will products/services be promoted for attracting customer attention at each stage?
- What kind of content resources and messages will we use for proposing value?
- What methods will we employ to segregate leads and qualify prospects along the buying cycle?
Paying heed to the demand generation processes
The whole revenue generation cycle is stamped with the presence of the demand generation processes.
The crux question:
How should campaigns and leads be managed to evoke greater buyer interest and what kind of data and marketing analysis needs to be performed towards meeting this end?
Once again, this question has to be answered by the sales and the marketing team in unison.
Instead of shoving marketing content and delivering messages down the throat of the buying fraternity, demand generation has to be worked upon based on the buyers journey. Pain points, interest areas, degree of interest and stage at which buyers are interacting must be thoroughly evaluated and this is where a new coinage “digital body Language” comes into the picture.
Buyers’ online demeanour is a giveaway of what’s on their mind and if your demand generation processes are bent towards understanding this digital body language of buyers at various stages, you may have won half the battle already.
While the sales and the marketing teams can manage many aspects of demand generation on their own, there are certain facets- like lead nurturing and prospect qualification- where both need to pool in and that too at the peak of their energies.
Marketing automation software
Integrating marketing and sales can never be complete if they are not aligned on the marketing automation software. You have come to grasp your buyers’ need and exactly the kind of personas you have got to tackle.
Once this part is taken care of, you will have to be even smarter in terms of personalising your target and timing your content. Delivering precise message is important and this is where the marketing automation software unfurls itself in full bloom.
Data management facilitated by automation software
Data management facilitated through technological automation will see you through the needs of dynamic data amendment and ‘updation’. Both the teams will have to work onstandardisingg data, based on their experiences and inferences, so that the data can conform to the modules of personalisation and segmentation.
I am not saying all this is easy but all this is in line with the way business models have evolved during what we may refer to as the “age of the business houses”.
