Catching up with our November sales and marketing alignment event

Established business owner or promising startup entrepreneur, new business is often what keeps us up at night. 

But have you considered aligning sales and marketing to give them a common, integrated approach? Most likely, 60% of your sales funnel is over before your sales team even speaks to the prospect... Marketing is the voice of sales before that point.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sales & marketing alignment is a sure fire way to accelerate your growth. Having everyone on the same page speaking a common language and driving towards the same goals is the perfect way to increase overall company revenue.

Read more: Our guide to sales enablement

In November this year, we partnered up with our good friends from HubSpot (namely Steve Vaughan). We delivered an over view of why your sales needs to be aligned with your marketing, and some tidbits of information on how you can ramp up activity in 2018.

What did we talk about?

• Sales & marketing alignment
• Personalised marketing
• Sales enablement
• Proving ROI from marketing
• Content marketing that works
• Account-based marketing

Our six sales and marketing alignment tips for 2018

As an inbound marketing agency, we are constantly testing, learning and improving how we deliver growth. We try new tools, new methods and a evaluate them for our clients. Our six tips for what to focus on in 2018 are:

1. Use common language

Get your sales & marketing teams speaking the same language. Historically, marketers are targeted with generating leads. but does that make sense for the overall company? Or even just for sales? Where is the emphasis on what happens to those leads? What about the quality?

Marketing needs to feed sales, but sales needs quality, not just quantity. Equally, sales has insight marketing doesn't.

As a marketing team, we involve our selves in everything bar the phone calls and admin (although there is some stuff we can do there too).

By giving the teams a common, more effective goal, you increase effectiveness exponentially.

Read more: Our guide to sales enablement

2. Embrace the robots

ChatBots will be the most exciting thing in marketing in 2018. They are easily implemented, very engaging, work when you are not and communicate in a very human way. ChatBots converse with site visitors, prospects and customers in a medium they understand and in a way they want to communicate.

The best part is they really, really work. We’ve run multiple tests and experiments across our own and client campaigns. Varying sectors, from form-less landing pages to midnight sales agents – it’s more than just incremental improvements. We've seen conversion rates improve by up to 20% and CPLs reduce by a factor of five. 

3. Automate where you can

Stop doing stupid repetitive stuff. Most sales processes are repetitive in parts. Follow up emails, client chasing, reminders, etc, etc. There's a lot of leg work.

Often, when we start working with a client, we're lucky if they try a new lead more than twice. On average though, it takes 4-7 attempts to connect with a prospect (according to HubSpot & Salesforce). So that's either a lot of wasted leads, or a lot of repetitive action.

Most of this can be automated using tools like HubSpot. Even in the latter stages of the sales cycle, we can automate follow ups, homework and contracts...

4. Appeal to the same challenges

Sales & marketing need to appeal to the same challengers and drivers being faced by your target prospects. Sales have incredible insight that marketing don't. They are the ones hearing the trends, challenges and objections from the prospects, day in and day out. Involve them in the marketing process. Regularly.

Sales can inform content at the top of the funnel. But even better, marketing can use sale's insight to align and perfect content at the middle and bottom of the funnel too.

Read more: Our guide to sales enablement

5. Consider account-based marketing

If you're targeting a small pool of high value, hard to reach clients, consider account-based marketing. ABM is about creating strategies around those hard to reach prospects and delivering messages to them across multiple channels in a way that nurtures them into your funnel.

Account-based marketing is a great way of getting in front of them, nurturing them and also using their colleagues to influence the sale. But ABM doesn't work if sales & marketing aren'y aligned.

Read more: Our guide to account-based marketing

6. Better [shared] insight

"Knowledge is power". To align sale & marketing, shared metrics are important for all sides to know how activity is doing. Performance, wins, failures, it should all be shared.

Want to a better understanding of how sales enablement could accelerate your business growth? Get our free guide below.