Freya Oxton-Grant
Sales and marketing alignment could potentially be the most important thing that needs to happen to your building product business. The data supporting how massively it can elevate your business’s sales and revenue speaks for itself.
- Sales and marketing alignment can trigger a 32% boost in year on year revenue growth,
- It can lead to over 200% growth in revenue attributed to marketing, and
- It can boost your sales win rates by 38% (Marketo)
When your sales and marketing teams align, your two most important departments can optimise their process as a whole. This means your entire marketing and sales funnel is working collaboratively, reducing costs and increasing business growth.
If you’re sales and marketing are misaligned, your business can suffer through not being united around common goals, objectives, and processes. You will probably be suffering from long sales cycles and poor conversion rates.
The buying behaviour of today’s B2B customer, including architects and specifiers, has evolved so much that marketing must support sales through each stage of the sales cycle in order to nurture leads every step of the way.
In this blog we will give you 5 steps to get your business back on track and your sales and marketing teams aligned.
Step 1: Establish Joint Objectives and KPIs
Sales and marketing teams should really be working together as the ‘revenue’ department. Establishing shared objectives and performance indicators means they automatically will need to work together and collaborate to generate revenue collectively.
Moreover, when each team understands what the other is working towards, they gain an understanding of the thought-process behind activities, meaning they can help each other out at any stage.
Step 2: Have A Clear Buyer Persona
Sales and marketing must establish a joint idea of the business’ ideal buyer persona. Using marketing’s insight, sales’ prospect understanding, and customer data, your business can have a clear ideal buyer persona that both teams are working towards marketing-to and closing-with.
This should also include a clear definition of what a prospect is in each stage of their buying journey e.g. MQL, SQL etc. Having this agreed on and documented is a simple thing but so important. According to CSO Insights, only 44% of companies have formally agreed on the definition of a qualified lead between sales and marketing.
Establishing a single view of the customer will enable your sales and marketing teams to effectively manage every lead throughout the entire lifecycle and across all marketing channels.
Step 3: Create a Strategy That Works for Both
Once the buyer persona has been clarified, the stages of the prospect life cycle can be developed for the lead nurturing process. This means you can then develop a lead scoring strategy.
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect that the marketing team has nurtured and is considered a good potential buyer. A sales accepted lead (SAL) is a lead that the sales team has received and is committed to act upon, and a sales qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect that the sales team believes is almost ready to buy.
When both teams come together to outline what, specifically, qualifies a lead as an MQL, SAL, or SQL, both teams are working with a lead scoring and nurturing strategy that works for all.
Step 4: Complete a Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Once you have developed your lead scoring and nurturing strategy with clearly outlined MQLs, SALs, and SQLs, you must create an SLA. An SLA is an agreement where responsibilities in that process are defined.
This makes hand-offs cleaner and more efficient and makes sure prospects don’t get messed around. It also means that where marketing automation and technology are used, the process is working as part of the system and each phase is documented and measured.
Step 5: Measure Success
Meeting together as the ‘revenue department’ and tracking your progress will turn up any issues before they start to impact your revenue and growth. Reporting on the success of each team will also create positive reinforcement for this ‘new’ way of working.
This will also give each team insight into how their work is performing. Which leads that marketing produced actually converted? What made them cross that finish line? How can that be repeated?
Furthermore, always be asking questions and working towards continuous improvement. Are high quality leads being targeted by marketing? Are sales happy with the lead scoring process? Are there any ideas sales have for new marketing content? Measuring and optimising is the only way to make sure you are positively moving forward.
Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams Aligned?
Whether you are working in a small or large business, with 10 or 100 people, sales and marketing alignment is integral to make sure you are not wasting time and effort on processes and activities that are not contributing to the whole.
Refocussing your business and aligning your sales and marketing departments will improve your bottom line through a healthier sales pipeline and increased conversion rates.
Want to learn more about sales and marketing alignment for your building products or construction business? Read our Complete Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment here.
About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.
They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.