This is the blog transcript of our video What Sales Needs from Marketing for Sales and Marketing Alignment. If you’d like to see more of our videos, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
In the past couple videos, we’ve been talking about aligning your sales and marketing efforts. One of the big reasons it can be such a challenge is because the needs of sales and the needs of marketing seem so similar but really they can be quite different.Hey everyone, I’m Ian Campbell, CEO of Mission Suite. Before we jump into today’s video, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos.
In today’s video I’m going to focus on what sales needs from marketing to make sure that marketing efforts can be aligned with sales activities and goals so that when a lead transitions from marketing to sales, it’s actually qualified enough to make the transition.
First off, sales needs content targeted to the people they’re talking to and specifically targeted to the stage of the buying cycle that they’re in.
We all know that if we’re targeting manufacturing companies, we need content specific to manufacturing companies. What a lot of us neglect, however, is content that’s created specifically for the stage of the buying cycle that they’re in.
For example, if I have a prospect who just finished watching a demo, I’d better have content that’s specific to the demo stage of my sales cycle. At that point, I need content that solidifies what I just talked to them about and helps them make the decision to move to the next stage of the buying cycle.
Similarly, if I connect with someone who’s never had a conversation with me or anyone from Mission Suite, I need to make sure that I have great introductory content that can get people engaged quickly and get them interested in having an in person conversation.
Next, you need to make sure that sales can have clear visibility into all of the marketing activities that got the lead or prospect to get to that conversation.
I know that I mentioned this in the Secret to Marketing and Sales Alignment video that we did a couple weeks ago (and if you need to see it, it’s linked here in the info card and in the description below) but this is REALLY important.
Sales cannot exist in a vacuum.
It just doesn’t work that way, especially these days. Remember that by the time a prospect is having a sales conversation, they’ve usually already done the vast majority of the research that they need to identify their problem, figure out the solution that they need and understand what must have features the solution will provide them. Hopefully that research came from content that you provided during your marketing process. And now you need to know that from the sales perspective as well.
If you’re a one person show, then you probably already have a pretty good idea of what they’ve seen and can work from memory but you’ll never be able to scale that way. The second that you bring in other people to help you, whether it’s on the sales side or the marketing side, there’s going to be a gap that you need to be able to bridge.
Your CRM should absolutely be able to give you, or whoever is handling sales for you, a quick and easy view into everything that your prospect has engaged with. How that looks will be different for everyone – maybe you just need a list of everything, maybe they need to be tagged, maybe something else.
What that visibility looks like is up to you but make sure it’s there.
We created an infographic about aligning sales and marketing efforts. To download it, drop down to the description of this video and you’ll find the download link.
And here’s the coup de gras.
Sales needs leads that have been scored based on their demographic information and by their activity history.
Lead scoring might be the single most impactful ways that you can connect your sales efforts with your marketing efforts.
I did a few Facebook Live videos on lead scoring that I loaded up here to YouTube that are worth checking out. They’re in the Facebook Live playlist and also linked here in the info card in the top right of the screen.
Here’s the trick to lead scoring, though – marketing can’t score leads independently of sales or vice versa. This is where the true alignment happens because both members of the Revenue Team are involved in the decision making process.
Demographic scoring allows you to make decisions on the value of each contact based solely on the information you have on them in the contact record. So if you know that you ONLY want CEOs in your sales funnel, you can score the title “CEO” at 100 points and set your sales triggers to 100 points so that any time you get someone who drops CEO into the title of the form they’re filling out, sales will be notified to follow up with them.
Of course, this is an overly simplified example and chances are you’ll need more demographic information before you actually want to send a lead to sales but it gives you an idea.
Activity scoring is how you’ll know how engaged they are as leads and allows you to decide when they’ve interacted with enough of your content to become a real sales prospect.
For example, you can say that every time someone clicks on a link in your emails, it’s worth 3 points. Maybe having a phone conversation is worth one point and a meeting is worth 10 points. If they download your introduction whitepaper, it’s worth 20 points. If they download the comparison whitepaper, it’s worth 30 points. And so on.
Doing this allows you to really understand just how engaged they are, and by that helps you to forecast interest. Of course, it’s never 100% accurate but it’s a pretty good indicator.
This is the important part, though. Make sure that you’re not trying to make these decisions without all of the key players on your Revenue Team involved. Make sure you consider all of the information that sales wants to see AND all of the information that they want the prospect to have seen.
From there, marketing will be able to chime in to discuss the strategic methods they’ll use to ultimately get that information and help you determine how long it should take to start seeing these high quality leads come in.
This can be hugely powerful and well worth the time it takes to set up.
The key to making sure that all of this works is a good CRM and marketing platform…kind of like Mission Suite!
If you want to learn more about how Mission Suite can help you manage all of this and really align your sales and marketing efforts, take a look at the description below for a link to register for one of our demo webinars.
Hey I hope you got something out of this video. And if you did, go ahead and give it a thumbs up and maybe a share so that others can see it too. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos and while you’re at it, check out these videos too!
We’ll see you next time around!