How Marketing & Sales Alignment Increases Revenue

Speaker 1: 00:00 
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the series that we've been doing recently on revenue driven marketing. And how marketing and sales team can, can help not only make the case for the revenue that they generate to the leadership team, but how to, how to generate that revenue more effectively. So today's episode we're going to focus on marketing and sales alignment. Why there's friction there sometimes. How do we get over that and how do we, how do we build clean handoff systems for, for marketing? So first topic is just, you know, what are the causes of friction? Why is there friction between sales and marketing and then how do you address them? Something that I've seen. It's kind of ironic that sales and marketing teams often there is friction there. Just the fact that there is friction is kind of ironic because they're doing this. The goal is the same. The goal for sales and marketing is to grow the business. Ultimately, at the end of the day, the goal is to grow the business. So what I've seen in situations where things are not great, where there's a little bit more of a, you say toxic work environment, something like that, one tends to blame the other when things are going right. So, so if you're not growing the way you want to, the sales blames the marketing team because they're not getting the right leads, right? The marketing team blames the sales because we're doing all this stuff and you're not following through. So there tends to be blame that's tossed around. And I think the issue is the handoff, right? When does something become a marketing qualified lead, as in someone we want to be talking to but who might not be ready to make a purchase yet versus someone who's actively shopping and now they're in the sales qualified mark, sales qualified lead stage. So identifying when does that, when does someone be, when are they go from that marketing qualified to that sales qualified? When do we hand them off to the sales team? Are they ready yet or are we rushing that process? Are we getting in front of them too early or are we missing them when they are, when they are shopping and we're just not getting people in front of them? A real life example I've seen of this is I've seen people host webinars and they got good attendance, maybe say they got 100 people to attend their webinar digitally. They would have their sales team go and call every single person on that webinar who attended and pitch them. And that did not work well because those, the, those people widely didn't have that they weren't nurtured properly and they were skipping steps. You had them at interest and awareness. Right. You're pushing them down to conversion. So you're skipping steps there. Yeah. You didn't qualify the leads properly and you're talking to them at the wrong stage, you're reaching out on the wrong stage. Yeah. And on the other side, yeah. You might have several people that are ready to buy and your sales team just doesn't know, isn't aware of. So mapping out that process specifically and it's going to look different for, for different companies but you know, where, where does someone hit or go? Okay, now we know that they're at a sales qualified lead. They've, they've shown us their intent, they're shown us that activity, they're telling us that, that they're shopping around and that they're ready. Any other thoughts there?

Speaker 2: 03:34 
So typically when they go into a lead magnet that you've made and they've made an action, that's when I typically would push them into. They're like looking for something, they've downloaded something.

Speaker 1: 03:48 
Yeah.

Speaker 2: 03:48 
But that only goes to me like that bottom of funnel. So even at that point there's a retargeting to get them into the gain phase, which I feel is the discovery, the, you know, looking into the product, getting more information, talking to a live chat feature. That's when I feel it really goes into that sales problem, that sales area. And a big problem that I can bring up is for startups, if marketing, sales and the product team aren't communicating like there's going to be problems. I had a, I had a company that we were working with and their product team was not relaying information about what the, you know, beta subscribers were asking in terms of features and it wasn't being relayed. So the marketing efforts were not matched up to the sales or the product. And a quick fix for that was just having those internal meetings moved from once a month where you just talk about basically vanity metrics to hey, at the top of the funnel, they're saying this during sales, they're asking these questions and when they're actually in the product testing it, they're actually wanting this. And by merging those things, it's basically communication. I think, you know, you kind of, you kind of mentioned it earlier. Sometimes marketing sales do not get along is because they're not willing to say that they're not doing things right. I think if you're an organization that looks for problems to solve them, you're going to be doing Much better. And I think the only way to do that is communication from top to.

Speaker 3: 05:32 
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Speaker 4: 06:09 
I was just going to say, you know, I think it's an exercise in conversion optimization. Again, right. Like okay, where, where in that example you gave with the webinar, where's the lead at? What's their mindset? What's the motivation of the user currently? Is it in a, in a place where a sales call is appropriate? It's just like the form example I mentioned in an earlier example. Am I going to get spammed after I fill out this form? Form, after this marketing form. Right. Like I think marketing sometimes stops thinking about conversion optimization. Like just hand it over to sales. But this is still an, an exercise in conversion optim optimization where there's anxiety, friction. You know, does someone have an incentive to take action? Do they have an incentive to take that sales call? Are you just calling them because you want revenue? Right. Like marketing sometimes stops the thinking and you know, of course sales could start thinking but someone, someone has to work as a team here to, to think about this exercise as a conversion that has yet to happen.

Speaker 2: 07:20 
Yeah.

Speaker 4: 07:20 
Handoff.

Speaker 1: 07:22 
Yeah, love that. So when we're talking about this handoff, how should we be qualify as marketers? How should we be qualifying those leads? How do we know when they're ready to hand off to the, to the sales team and to get that going? I think the big thing there is qualifying your leads and knowing where they're at in the funnel. Like we were just saying, are they in the awareness stage, nurturing them to the next level? That maybe that's SEO, organic social media. Right. An awareness focused paid ad, something like that to get somebody just entered into the funnel to begin with. But then once they're in there, where are your leads at in this stage? You know, if they're at the interest stage. Right. Maybe they're following your business page on LinkedIn or on a different social media page. They're interested, they're probably liking posts, maybe even commenting. They're Returning, they're going to your website multiple times. Maybe they're subscribing to your YouTube channel. They're telling you their actions are indicating to you that their audience is interested in the content that you have to say. But they not, they're, they might not be ready to buy just yet. I think it was, you know, it's like less than 10% of your audience at any given point is ready to make a purchase. So a lot of this is building that trust up and that awareness and that relationship with your customers up so that when they are shopping, you're top of mind, you get further on, you get past the interest. When they're starting to consider, they're starting to shop. You need to know what your audience needs in order to go to the consideration stage. Now, what are their, what are their objections? What are the things that they're looking for? Things like case studies, success stories, some prestige or your reputation. You got to know what, what moves the needle there. And then how to identify them. How are you able to identify someone who's in the consideration stage? What you have to map out what actions kind of lead take that is telling you, all right, this person's considering your, your services. Maybe they're very active on your email. Maybe they're opening and clicking and going to your website. You can track things like that, how many clicks. You can even attribute points to certain actions to, right? To quantify how active they've been there. Maybe they're clicking on pricing on your webpage. Maybe they're requesting more information about your business. After a webinar, you have to mark these actions out ahead of time so that you know when someone does X, this means Y and Z, right? If someone's clicking if, if there's a pricing link on an email and someone clicks on it, they're telling you that they're, they're considering you and you should be thoughtful about that. So mark these actions out ahead of time and have a system that automatically tracks when a lead has graduated from one stage to the other. And this is what CRMs and software are so helpful for to, to, to judge this pipeline and see where that health is at. But if you're not tracking any of these things, if you don't have specific metrics at each stage, you're not going to know where they're at in this, in the sales pipeline. And you just. I've seen this a bunch of times. You have a CRM, it's got 10,000 people in it, but you don't know who Are who are previous customers, who are potential customers who are. Right. Who are people who have opened an email in forever. If you haven't identified the specific steps that people are going to take at each level of this funnel, you're not going to be able to nurture them and then eventually hand them off to the sales team.

Speaker 4: 11:01 
Yeah, I think, you know, of course making sure that the lead scoring on the marketing side is, is working correctly. Like automation can be great, but if you're not supervising it or you know, using the latest in AI advancements for, for lead scoring, you know, you can just be handing over leads that aren't appropriate for. For sales or aren't well qualified. So all kinds of things that could go wrong. Another thing I see is kind of like this. Can't you just thinking, you know, it's like, okay, marketing's got the lead and then sales. Can't you just close this? Like somehow the marketing just stops thinking. It's like, not my problem. Right. So you guys, you guys take care of it and then sales is like, can't you just hand us better leads? Like it's misunderstanding and a gap in, in thinking and just throwing things over the board that I see behavior wise.

Speaker 1: 11:58 
Yeah. So that collaboration between the two is, is really important.

Speaker 2: 12:02 
Yep.

Speaker 1: 12:03 
Well, and that cues us up perfectly for the next topic here we want to talk about how do we. How can marketing and sales teams use shared data to improve decision making? And like you said at, right at the beginning, you just have to at least be talking about it. Right. You have to be meeting sales teams and marketing teams should be working together and being intentional about this. But yeah, you need good communication when maintaining and growing your funnel. The marketing team really relies on the sales team for information. Your sales team is going to be interacting, probably the people who interact with your clients, especially, you know, particularly before they become clients. The sales team are the people talking to, to your leads. They're going to have great information regarding your buyer Personas. The pain points, the objections they have, you know, what, what are they? What are they excited about? What do they ignore? How did they find your business? Sales people are on the ground, they're talking to these people. So there's a ton of really valuable information. Just like, hey, when you're talking to this specific buyer Persona, what works for them? What turns their head? What gets their attention? What helped close the deal? These are really important questions that a marketing team needs to ask from the sales team and should inform and really influence how we're thinking about it and Then any other way flip that relationship. I think it's important for marketing to remind salespeople that their job is to load up the sales team with as much business as they can handle. Remind them like, we're on the same team, our goals are aligned, we're, we're both headed toward, we, we're both headed towards the same direction. We both want the same thing. Marketing's job is, is to just. If marketing is doing their job well, the sales team is overloaded with qualified leads which would make them very, very happy. So people in sales want as many good leads as they can possibly get. And I think it's important just to remind them, hey, our job is to do this for you. That's that I, I'm here to provide you with, with qualified real leads. So I think getting, just getting on the same. Right. Getting those goals aligned is, is a good reminder when we're having these discussions. And then yeah, marketing can share data of what they're seeing as well. What messaging is, is pulling people in, what social media content is working, what blogs are working. You know, is there a webinar that you guys did that performed particularly well? Why did it do that? And how can you use that information to guide your decision and influence sales process as well? So when done right, this should dramatically improve your sales conversion rates as well as your marketing efforts when they're done in unity, when these teams are working together, it's a symbiotic relationship. You, one relies on the other and if, if there's a break, there is really when you see that that marketing funnel start to come apart, I think. Any other thoughts there on, on using shared data?

Speaker 2: 15:11 
Yeah, I just think that the bigger you get, the more leads that are coming in, the more communication you need to have. And it doesn't need to be these long drawn out meetings. It just needs to be like, hey, what is the overall quality score of these leads coming in? You know, what are they, what are they saying? Where do you think they are? And then being able to relay the data of where you are getting these leads from. If you're seeing any increases, instead of being just numbers driven, you should be more focused on quality. And I think that a lot of these two don't really like work together on that. So by making sure that you're really communicating on where the lead came from, the quality of it and working together, I think that communication aspect would really help.

Speaker 4: 16:04 
Yeah, that's so important. You know, like, I think there's just so much wasted time too. Like time is an organizational asset. And if the salespeople are being pinged for XYZ leads that aren't qualified, that aren't solid, you know, they, they're wasting time that they could be prospecting or, you know, doing another valuable activity. So that efficiency and wasted, wasted time is, is key to not, you know, to not ignore limited hours.

Speaker 1: 16:37 
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So to wrap up this discussion, what processes and tools help sales and marketing team in this collaboration? What can we do to get these two different groups in the organization to work together? I think the biggest one that I've seen is a lot of companies have a CRM. Not many companies are really diligent about their CRM. Your CRM is the single source of truth a lot of the time when it comes to the health of your marketing funnel, it's the most helpful piece of software for tracking where people are at in your funnel. There are a lot of good options here when it comes to software. We mentioned HubSpot. There's, there's lots of other ones. But the point here is to make a point of reviewing your funnel with both the sales and marketing team regularly to make sure it's healthy. Right? Are we getting enough people in at the top levels? Are we nurture them through, Are we closing them into clients? And then it doesn't stop there, right? Are we, how are we retaining them and how are we encouraging them to advocate for our business? These meetings should happen regularly. I really honestly think sales and marketing team should be meeting weekly to go over this kind of thing, to share data, to share the wins, to share the struggles, to, to identify pain points, to identify those, those bottlenecks in our funnel that stops people from progressing. Because like we talked about earlier, right, It's a bad look on both marketing and sales if the business isn't growing. So staying diligent in your CRM, using that as your single source of truth is a big deal. And then, yeah, using that CRM, it helps define a lead scoring system that we talked about already a little bit. It helps you to identify your leads who have graduated to that next stage. Right? And that changes how graduates, how you talk to them, what content you're going to show them. It changes the messaging quite a bit when someone's at top level versus bottom level of the funnel. So you need to know where your leads are at. Are they in awareness, interest? Right. Where are they at and how can we talk to them and how can we move them down that funnel and keep them happy and get valuable stuff in front of any Other thoughts here for that?

Speaker 4: 19:03 
You know, maybe, maybe it's a little table stakes these days, but I feel like for plenty of orgs, it's not just having the basics like call recording software.

Speaker 1: 19:13 
Right.

Speaker 4: 19:13 
That, you know, rather than, I mean, of course you can ask your, your sales folks about, you know, what prospects are saying these days, but why not look at the actual data, throw it into AI. There are some AI tools that throw that now surface insights about the buyer conversations that are happening rather than keeping that in a sales cycle. Sales silo. You know, look, look at the data. Use, use the data for your marketing initiatives. So that's, that's one thing that's basic and, you know, useful that, that someone could do pretty easily. Any other what's ideas?

Speaker 2: 19:54 
I think if you're on the marketing team and you don't know what CRM you're using or how to use it, then you're not integrated into the system enough. I think if you're on the sales team and you don't know the current marketing operation and what the goal is, then you're not integrated enough. So, you know, talking about those weekly cadences again, the bigger you get, the more you have to know, like, what is coming. Also, where things are going. It can't just be sales teams sitting, hey, we're waiting for new leads, or marketing team saying, hey, are you closing these? There has to be that connection point too many times again, like, they, they don't even know what the CRM is. They don't know what dashboards are in there. They don't know how the leads are being even segmented. They don't have an idea about what the discovery calls or any of those things are, you know, what's happening. They're not asking for data and they're not giving it in return. So breaking down those silos and having a much more, you know, you know, controlled operation where it's less fragmented, people are, you know, much more open to communicating, offering constructive criticism and just, you know, taking that into consideration when they go back and they meet with their specific teams.

Speaker 1: 21:20 
Yeah, I think it's about communicating the value that the sales team gets out of even doing this. If it's, if it's just another to do. We all have lots of to dos in the day, right? If you're not connecting these efforts to your job performance, literally, like, this will. This will get you more sales. This, this will help you close more business. This will help you keep your job secure. That ties in like, all right, why am I doing this? Oh, right. This, this, this helps me to close more deals, to get more business in the. And. And to, to close more business. So I think tying that, just that communication piece too of like, why are we doing this? That we're doing this because it literally helps you do your job better. I think that connects the why to these efforts. Otherwise it's just another choreograph. It's just another to do on the sheet. You're not as invested in it if you can tie it back to the result. I think is, is a big part of that.

Speaker 4: 22:12 
Yeah. And I would, I would say, you know, of course, get marketing sales in sync, sharing data. But at some point, many, many companies, if not all companies will want to talk to service and incorporate data from service. Right? Like if you got a bunch of customer churn and people are going out, leaving bad reviews and, or, you know, talking to their friends. The concept of dark social, right. There's the positive aspects, but also the negative aspects. The things you can't track in marketing. These conversations that happen in Slack channels and, and text messages and conversations. You know, you gotta, you gotta think about that because it affects, ultimately it can come back and affect sales and marketing. So ideally it's a holistic picture. And that's kind of, you know, the rev ops concept of this holistic picture that everyone's talking to each other. That's, that's the nirvana state. Right. Like this data is somewhere where all teams can look at it, everyone's working together and talking to each other. But of course, that's, that's easier said than done.

Speaker 1: 23:16 
Yeah. Love it. Thank you. Well, thanks for your thoughts here. We're going to continue our series, but this wraps up our revenue driven marketing series that we've been going through. Thank you so much for listening and following along. If you have questions, please reach out. Please comment. We'll do our best to address those, but thank you again and we'll see you soon.