What Does Successful Sales & Marketing Alignment Look Like? (Part II)

When I first got into marketing over a decade ago, the landscape was much different than it is today. Marketing and sales typically worked independently from one another; marketing managed things like trade shows and print collateral (with limited visibility into their impact on overall ROI) and sales managed the leads that marketing acquired.

This made marketing an overhead expense, and it was an easy target for cuts when budgets got tight. It was hard to show conclusive evidence that marketing made a measurable impact on the overall success of the sales organization beyond getting more leads. We knew it was true, but the data was elusive.

Fast forward to today, and things look somewhat different (but still far from perfect). As a marketer, I now have tools and applications that can more easily generate data and therefore quantify results of our marketing activities. I can follow the activity of a lead through the entire lifecycle, including if and when a lead turned into a serious prospect. And I can see the touch points that marketing created or influenced along the path from initial inquiry to a closed deal. Suddenly, there is real correlation between the campaigns we run and the ROI for my colleagues on the sales side.

With that in mind, I thought I would share a few insights I’ve learned along the way:

Make Marketing Your BFF: Sales and marketing teams actually have a symbiotic relationship. That means that despite the fact that we are different types, we each depend on each other and benefit from the relationship. Your marketing team should provide essential insights that help sales generate and identify the best leads, the best ways to interact with those leads, and provide the resources, messages and delivery methods to support those interactions. And sales should provide feedback from the front line to create a knowledge-sharing loop with marketing. Marketing and sales should have their goals aligned, work cooperatively toward those goals and, ideally, should be BFFs (Best Friends Forever).

Set Specific Marketing Goals: My income is tied directly to the number of qualified leads I can drive through marketing initiatives, among other measurable goals. Don’t be afraid to assign metrics to your marketing team and engage them in the process. And reward them for meeting those metrics. Nothing says motivation like dollars in your pocket! Sales reps have known this all along. Now it’s marketing’s turn to benefit from hitting their targets.

Use the Right Tools: While many of the marketing-specific tools on the market are relatively new, they have evolved quickly and can be quite powerful. Example 1: Marketing automation tools help marketers track and understand data behind campaigns, while also observing the behaviors and patterns of your prospects. We use Marketo and there are other great systems to choose from depending on your needs. Example 2: As part of our BigMachines software, we offer the BigMachines Document Engine, where our customers can store the most up-to-date templates for proposals, contracts and quotes, making it simple for sales team to generate branded, marketing-approved sales documents. This allows you to maintain corporate standards throughout the sales process, and when you present a consistent brand that reflects well on your company, you have a competitive advantage and can sometimes even command a higher price.

I’d love to hear what other marketers and sales executives are seeing. Are you noticing more alignment between the marketing and sales groups at your company? Have you implemented strategies within your organization that help sales and marketing work better together? Leave a comment below or reach out to us on Twitter @bigmachines.

Will Wieglar

Will Wiegler is Vice President of Marketing at BigMachines. Follow BigMachines on Twitter @BigMachines.

4 Social Media ROI Tips for Sales Leaders

These tips are taken from Social Media is Getting Tired … Social Business is the New Frontier, by Gerhard Gschwandtner, founder and publisher of Selling Power magazine.

Suggested Social-Media Action Steps for Sales Leaders:

  1. Change your mind-set from social media (low ROI) to social business (measurable ROI).
  2. Expand the definition beyond personal selling. Turn your salespeople into digital influencers. Teach them how to listen online, join the right communities, and engage customers in their social-business sphere. Give them sales intelligence tools, such as InsideView for Sales.
  3. Create your social business strategy before searching for the best technology. Gartner considers Jive, Lithium, and salesforce.com as key players in the market.
  4. Take a closer look at Social CRM tools. SugarCRM, Nimble, and salesforce.com executives participated in a great panel discussion on the subject. Note how Jon Ferrara (founder of GoldMine) sees the future of Social CRM in this video:

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Learn more on November 15, 2011, in Santa Monica at the Sales Strategies in a Social & Mobile World conference. Gschwandtner will be there with many expert speakers, including Anneke Seley (author, Sales 2.0), Jeffrey Hayzlett (former CMO, Kodak), Todd McCormick (PGi), Brett Queener (salesforce.com), and Jon Ferrara (Nimble).

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What True Sales & Marketing Alignment Looks Like (Part I)

For many sales and marketing leaders, there is still work to be done when it comes to improving the relationship between their teams. Recently, my company, BigMachines, released a 2011 Benchmark Survey on the state of the sales industry, featuring responses from 100 sales executives. The aim of the survey was to uncover the biggest pain points affecting their jobs today. The top result? Two-thirds of respondents said that the biggest pain point is the disconnect between sales and marketing.

This is troubling to hear because when the lines of communication are broken, opportunities might be missed, errors can occur, and deals can even be lost. I’m fortunate to work for a company that takes the relationship between marketing and sales seriously and highly values collaboration. Here’s a portrait of how sales and marketing work for us:

My marketing team is an integral part of the sales process. We work closely with both inside and outside sales teams to provide the right messages to prospects and customers at the right times. We also provide them with an ongoing stream of sales leads and help them prioritize those leads based on demographics and interest levels.

Sales knows that marketing is here to help them meet their sales targets. We provide the intelligence and expertise to help them win. Our job is to build the supporting infrastructure to deliver selling messages via the most effective channels, and then monitor the results.

Our goals are aligned and we work (and play) as a team. Month after month, members of our sales team nominate members of my marketing team for “Star of the Month” awards. Sales thinks we rock (and we do)!

Have you implemented strategies within your organization that help sales and marketing work better together?

Will Wieglar

Will Wiegler is Vice President of Marketing at BigMachines. Follow BigMachines on Twitter @BigMachines

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Sales Success in a Social & Mobile World

This post is an excerpt from “Sales Success Strategies for a Social & Mobile World,” by Gerhard Gschwandtner.

Since social media is accessible on most mobile devices, real time collaboration is the new rage. A VP of Sales shared the story of driving in a cab to visit a client. He posted a question on Chatter:

“Visiting XYZ in London, any thoughts that I could share to enhance our relationship?”

Within minutes the company’s CFO shared:

“Yes, they owe us $400,000 that’s 60 days overdue.”

The results, the VP was able to eliminate the bottleneck in the company’s payment process. Problem solved.

The social media world is slowly moving in a new direction. Let’s say you are working in a company that employs 600 salespeople. Would you want to follow everybody? No.  You’d follow the top ten thought leaders and learn what’s important to them. The big shift: from quantity to quality connections. Social learning companies like Saba.com benefit from this new trend by continually refining social learning tools.

Someone recently told me: “I consider the iPhone as an extension cord to my brain.” Social media has become a second brain for everybody. Why not use it more effectively to serve the community and serve your business?

I’m looking forward to discussing these issues in depth during our next conference on November 14-15 in Santa Monica with plugged-in leaders like Anneke Seley and Jeff Hayzlett. Check out the agenda and reserve your spot now:

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Gerhard Gschwandtner

Gerhard Gschwandtner is founder and publisher of Selling Power magazine, and is host of the Sales 2.0 Conference series. Follow him on Twitter @gerhard20.

Are Sales Reps Just Complaining, or Is Lead Quality Really Down?

One of the first complaints a sales leader will hear from an underperforming salesperson is that the leads from marketing are not up to par. “It’s not me — it’s the leads. They’re terrible.” The next thing you know, all your other salespeople are also convinced that the leads are terrible, and suddenly you’ve got an entire sales team demotivated to perform.

For a long time, there was no way for sales leaders to assess the accuracy of complaints about sales leads. Are the leads truly low quality? Or has the rep not been trained properly on how to deal with this particular kind of lead?

This is a sales leadership issue that has bothered me for years. But at HubSpot, we’ve been as proactive as possible in taking the subjectivity out of the issue of lead quality by using data and metrics.

One framework for lead intelligence data is demographic data (for example, company size and revenue) versus engagement data (for example, how many times the prospect visited your site and/or downloaded materials). We use this kind of information to develop our lead quality score. We can then have more quantitative discussions about lead quality. For example, as opposed to “the leads suck,” we can gather feedback such as: “The percentage of B2B companies with greater than $100 million in revenue has dropped by 24% in the past week. This trend is problematic, as these types of leads close to customers 37% more than the average sales qualified lead”.

The other aspect of lead quality we examine is salesperson performance on specific lead segments across a broader set of salespeople. When a segment of leads is under-performing, typically this result is either because the sales team is not adequately trained on how to handle these leads or the leads are in fact not a great fit for your offering. If you find that all your salespeople struggle with the lead segment, then the leads are probably not a great fit for your offering. But if, say, four salespeople performed well with the lead segment and 11 did not, then you have a sales training issue. Your next step would be to look at the four reps who are doing well, find out how they’re approaching those leads, and get the rest of the team trained on those techniques quickly.

A good example of this at HubSpot is our non-profit leads. Our reps used to avoid selling to this segment like the plague: “Don’t give me nonprofits – there’s too much red tape and they don’t spend a lot of money.” The data showed a different story. In fact, nonprofits did have a longer sales cycle, and it took a deeper qualification process to find out who the decision makers were. But when you got them to sign up, they became phenomenal customers, which made its way back into the salesperson commission plan.

It’s amazing how often the data differs from the gut feel of the salesperson. If you make that data known, reps stop complaining and instead start figuring out what they need to do to translate leads into deals.

Mark Roberge will share insights about lead quality and sales and marketing alignment on September 20, 2011 in a webinar sponsored by Selling Power. To register, click here.

Mark Roberge
Mark is responsible for the entire sales function at HubSpot, having grown the team from 1 to 80 employees in five years. Prior to HubSpot, Mark founded and/or held executive positions at start-ups in the social media and mobile sector. Connect with him on LinkedIn and Twitter