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How to align Sales and Marketing to improve your online ROI? Finding any brand-new approach or method to accelerate a company's growth trajectory is uncommon. There is no such thing as a "magic bullet"; rather, the key is to utilize your current resources more effectively.
Prior to joining Nutshell, I worked in Michigan to establish and manage a small digital business that specialized in leadership development. We worked for a variety of businesses, from small local start-ups like Quizzle and Amplifinity to major corporations like Quicken Loans, Cisco, and Compuware, in both the B2B and B2C arenas.
No matter how big or small the business, the largest and most persistent lost opportunity I observed throughout my tenure at the agency was cooperation and coordination between the sales and marketing teams.
Over time, I discovered that we achieved the best results when we served as a liaison between the sales and marketing divisions of our customers, promoting interaction and cooperation between the two. As someone with a background in marketing, I also found that I really liked working with sales teams and that being held to their performance goals was really useful.
How to Align Sales and Marketing to Improve Your Online ROI?
As it turns out, I'm not the only one who has seen this. Marketo describes sales and marketing alignment as "possibly the biggest opportunity for increasing business performance today." MathMarketing and Marketo discovered that 500 organizations with synchronized sales and marketing teams have the following characteristics:
- a 67% greater likelihood that leads created by marketing would close
- improved lead acceptance by 108%
- 209% more leads produced by marketing contributed to revenue
So when I was given the option to join Nutshell and work with its Growth team—a unit that combines sales and marketing—I seized the chance. It's been an incredible experience, and I can state with certainty that a Growth team is the greatest sales and marketing strategy I've ever seen.
The Growth Team Defined
Stop considering sales and marketing teams as teams right now in order to begin comprehending the growth team's mentality (plural).
A single team.
Although this may seem a little radical to some, I assure you that it is actually extremely natural and far more intuitive than the typical siloed approach.
What actually unites sales and marketing as a team, then? The common objective of revenue increase is straightforward. In the end, this is the main criteria that both marketers and salespeople are striving for and evaluated on. (And if you're not, you should be assessing the efficiency of your marketing staff in terms of revenue growth.)
The goal of both sales and marketing is to make sales, even if they may sit at various places along the sales funnel (although the exact location appears to be moving these days). Regardless of the lead kind, there is only ever one route from "first contact to the pleased client," in the words of one of our own, Andy Fowler.
The fact that your customer's journey isn't always linear should also be kept in mind. Why do I say that? I'm referring to the extremely popular infographic of a funnel, which depicts the "perfect" journey of a potential client. Sales teams frequently like this infographic since it appears so orderly and logical.
However, the buyers themselves eventually decide their own courses. And we are all aware that, more often than not, individuals make judgments based on emotion rather than logic. A buyer who declares they are prepared to buy could change their mind and withdraw. The opposite might also occur: A buyer attracted by top-of-the-funnel marketing might want to make a purchase right away. (This latter scenario is becoming more frequent in the modern era of the self-educated consumer.)
The ability to pick up the ball at any stage in the funnel is therefore a must for both your marketing and sales specialists. And the only effective way to achieve that is for them to work together and communicate constantly.
Being on a "Growth Team" is more than simply a line on an organizational chart; it's a way of thinking. Sales and marketing are two teams that frequently don't communicate with one another and have communication issues. Growth teams, on the other hand, are cohesive, focused, and flexible.
I want to quickly emphasize that growth teams aren't only for opulent SaaS organizations. They were initially created when marketers, sales executives, and engineers started collaborating to promote growth through rewarded user behavior integrated into the product experience (e.g., Dropbox offering free storage space for referring friends). As forward-thinking businesses showed how effective this type of cooperation might be, the phrase has evolved to refer to a concept rather than an industry-specific organizational structure.
Growth teams, in my opinion, are multidisciplinary teams of bright individuals working together to achieve a common goal: revenue growth.
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The highlight of a growth team is this: Even if they aren't aware of it yet, your marketing and sales gurus are eager to collaborate.
Even while they each have unique abilities and their daily tasks might vary greatly, they both sell every day, and everybody who sells realizes that we all share a common bond. The chemistry is there, even though your first attempts to unite these two may go a little awry (the Harvard Business Review has even gone so far as to call the fight between sales and marketing a "war").
So let's discuss how to capitalize on the sales and marketing components of a growth team's skills.
Salespeople and managers are:
Professionals in personalization. Good salespeople are able to read their prospects, acquire data in the moment, and modify their proposals as necessary.
Driven by a desire to transact. They keep things straightforward and are totally preoccupied with the client and the transaction.
A constant connection to your consumers. They are the ones that interact with your clients when they are making purchases, therefore they are quite familiar with them and their requirements.
Excellent at locating the correct lead. They have a deep understanding of the demographics most likely to purchase your good or service, which is important knowledge to have when creating marketing collateral.
Marketers include
Content creators and campaign builders. Marketers excel at producing valuable material that is also interesting. Marketers may be of great assistance to salespeople in this area because the sales process is just a customized campaign.
Creative ideators. They think creatively since there is intense rivalry for a prospect's attention that extends beyond your immediate competitors and takes into account the entire digital environment as well as all the other distractions in a person's life. Use your marketing expertise to generate concepts that stand out from the crowd.
Motivated to cast a wider net. When marketers can manage bigger amounts of "things," such as traffic or leads, they are more effective. if you're trying to execute a large-scale project, such as a one-to-many demo.
Experimental and iterative risk takers. Marketers prefer to continuously develop and test new ideas since they generate campaigns for a wide variety of consumers. Marketers may develop tactics that are more successful at producing high-quality leads with the help of sales representatives.
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| Image Credit: Forbes |
Marketers and salespeople are both:
- Strategists
- Data analysts
- Results driven
To unite your team, emphasize these similarities as well as the shared objective of revenue development. Your Growth team will be more cohesive if they have a wide range of skills and a strong level of communication, which will result in better campaigns and higher-quality leads. A number of strategies, including the following, may be made by combining sales and marketing techniques:
- targeting social media, content, and email campaigns for cold-calling to warm the list
- Bots that use chat to arrange and start sales interactions
- personal email correspondence with prospects from TOFU campaigns
Personalized email templates created by marketers with input from salespeople (and then refined over time through iteration)
Putting the trash out, and Other Useful Advice on Sales and Marketing Coordination
It is imperative that a growth team acknowledges the following due to the frequent animosity between sales and marketing:
1. Even a perfectly coordinated growth team will occasionally produce bad leads.
2. Even a well-coordinated growth team may occasionally come up with bad campaign ideas.
This basically implies that we all empty the garbage! Everyone occasionally has stupid ideas, it's a fact. The blame game, which sales and marketing teams frequently play, may be avoided by acknowledging this right away. To agree to take out the garbage as a group is akin to conducting blameless autopsies. You may cultivate a culture that encourages problem-solving without stifling innovation by emphasizing learning from mistakes rather than aggressively pointing fingers.
I also strongly advise role-swapping and role-hybridization to further foster teamwork among members and to improve their skill sets. Get your marketing staff involved in real sales calls, and give your sales representatives real marketing initiatives to work on. Everyone will be better able to comprehend and appreciate what the other team members do as a result of this. Since my expertise is greater in marketing, one of the first things I did at Nutshell was created a BDR for myself. It provided me with some really useful information about what potential consumers were looking for and how we might enhance our marketing collateral to hasten the sales process.
A Growth team ought to sit collectively, notwithstanding the absurdity of the idea. Our content team and designers at Nutshell can actually hear sales conversations because of our shared office space, and our sales representatives can participate in creative discussions like deciding which GIF to use in the upcoming Nutshell newsletter. (Yes, there has to be a lot more discussion.)
I detest meetings just as much as the next person, yet they are essential for a Growth team to succeed. The amount of collaboration and the ease with which ideas will flow will increase as everyone becomes more aware of what each other is doing.
A growth team must also ensure that they have uniform KPIs and shared terminology. The definitions of a lead, a marketing-qualified lead, and a sales-qualified lead must be agreed upon by all parties. (Side note: You might be questioning why segment leads and responsibilities are even necessary for a single Growth team. Why not go completely hybrid? Consider your Growth team to be a team of specialized forces, similar to the Green Berets or Navy Seals. Although they all work together to carry out and complete their objective, each team member has a specific area of expertise, from the team commander to the explosives specialist to the medic to the communications officer.
Consider the user behaviors that might be impacted by sales and marketing activities when selecting unified metrics for your growth team. The number of registered live demo attendees, the number of scheduled personal demos, and engaged trial users are just a few of the metrics that Nutshell tracks across all of our analytics.
Together, the members of the sales and marketing teams must propel these statistics forward if they are to increase. These figures should always drive the BIG number, which is revenue, regardless of the measures you use.
Team members who are more concerned with sales and marketing should still have their own metrics, but they should be carefully selected so that they can contribute to the unified metrics. These figures for sales representatives may include calls made, meetings booked, talks had, or response time. Furthermore, these KPIs on the marketing side are probably going to be site traffic, traffic-to-lead conversion rate, email acquisition, and email engagement. The entire team should be routinely updated on these distinct figures, and everyone should be involved in formulating plans for achieving them.
If your business offers commissions and/or incentives, make sure they are determined by the same parameters and that they are given to every member of the growth team—not just the sales representatives! This will lessen the hostility that frequently exists between those working in sales and marketing.
Another source of conflict between sales representatives and marketers is their different timelines. Engage all members of your growth team in both short-term and long-term projects to debunk this. For instance, you may buy a list of contacts for cold calls and ask your marketers to create an email template to go with it. Consider incorporating your sales-oriented team members in content generation and branding strategy in the long run.
Spend some time deciding on your team's goals, and make sure they are realistic. The sooner everyone achieves a win together, the better. Setting a small goal, achieving it, and then setting a new goal are all preferable to setting a big goal, never achieving it, and feeling like the entire endeavor was a failure.
We at Nutshell like letting everyone know about our accomplishments.
We utilize Nutshell's Slack interface to automatically communicate significant successes so that the entire business may take pleasure in them. We have a Slack channel specifically for our wins. I make it a point to discuss both the marketing materials that attracted those leads and the efforts our sales professionals make to finalize transactions. Every victory is a team effort, therefore let's all rejoice at once!
Takeaways
Get your sales and marketing teams to collaborate on a single, common objective—revenue growth—in order to bring them together.
Rarely is your sales funnel a straight path from top to bottom. Your team is better able to provide your prospects what they need, when they need it, thanks to communication and coordination between sales and marketing.
Naturally, sellers and marketers have distinct strengths. Highlight their shared interests in strategy and data analysis, as well as their attention to results.
Even a growth team that works well together may occasionally generate bad leads and bad advertising ideas. Learning from your errors requires honest (but blame-free) post-mortems.
Everyone's awareness and respect of what other team members perform improves when your sales and marketing professionals sometimes switch positions (and give them new skills to boot).
Your growth team should meet frequently to discuss strategies while seated in the same room. The more one person is aware of what the other is doing, the easier it will be for them to work together.
Team members who are focused on sales and marketing should still have their individual KPIs, but they should collectively drive a set of common metrics that result in increased revenue.
Set team objectives that result in doable cooperative victories, and celebrate your accomplishments with the entire organization.
Reference
https://www.nutshell.com/blog/growth-team-sales-and-marketing-alignment
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