When offered a free front-row seat to presentations by 30+ of the most prominent sales influencers, you can bet I’ll jump on the opportunity. So, after getting wind of yesterday’s Virtual Social Selling Summit, I signed up to join the 10,000+ professionals tuning in for sessions.
With a dual background in Sales and Marketing, I was sure to check out Matt Heinz’ presentation: B2B Sales Enablement: How Marketing Can Help Sales Double Productivity and Success.
Matt kicked off the presentation with a chart from Demand Metric showing the level to which sales and marketing systems are integrated has a direct impact on revenue goals. This research showed that when sales and marketing teams are highly aligned, there’s an 80% achievement of revenue goals, versus only 44% attainment for companies with little alignment and 36% for companies with no alignment at all.
What does this show? Alignment is key, and both sales and marketing can have a significant impact on the ability for sales team to sell. All sounds great, but I bet many of you would back me up in saying…
Turning Sales and Marketing into a Power Couple isn’t always the easiest of tasks.
Fortunately, Matt provided 4 fundamentals to set your organization up for success:
- Do the math – Quantify what success looks like. Everything marketing is doing should have a measurable goal. How many deals do we need to close? What kind of lead volumes do we need to achieve that? If you haven’t done this math, you’ll find that marketing is doing a bunch of great stuff that has no bearing on what sales actually needs to achieve.
- Create a clear customer profile – Know who your customers are. Focus on who the customer is you’re selling to, what objectives they have to achieve success, and any obstacles that prevent them from getting there. Make sure your Marketing resources are geared around the people and problems that exist in the marketplace, not your specific products.
- Map the sales and buying process – If you don’t understand what steps your buyers go through and adjust your sales process to fit into this, you can create friction between yourself and your customer. It’s important for Marketing to understand this aspect of the buying process they can produce content that salespeople actually need to add value, when buyers need it in their buying journey.
- Plan to fire lots of bullets – Jim Collins outlines this in his book Good to Great. The difference between phenomenal companies and good companies is that phenomenal companies fire a lot of bullets and don’t spend a lot of money on expensive bullets to test. Mediocre companies go right to the cannon. Do some testing before making big investments in marketing programs, and try out a bunch of things. Something is bound to stick, and when it does, that’s what you should invest the most time and money in.
Because Marketing plays a large role in the success of the overall sales organization, they need to know what’s most helpful for Sales and align their strategy around the fulfillment of these needs. Following these fundamentals will make it easier for your Sales and Marketing orgs to become a more cohesive unit and develop into a Power Couple that has a greater impact on the bottom line.
