2. In this week’s #B2BChat, sharing ideas and thoughts on sales and marketing alignment is the agenda.
This presentation takes a Nexsales shot at answering the questions they have raised as part of these
conversations
• Why is sales and marketing alignment difficult for most organizations?
• Who should take the lead in the alignment process—marketing or sales?
• What are marketing’s main complaints about sales?
• What are sales’ main complaints about marketing?
• What role do leads play in the effort to align marketing and sales?
• Does automated lead management help or hinder sales and marketing alignment?
• Should the marketing and sales teams share common goals and compensation plans?
• How do you measure sales and marketing alignment?
• How can sales and marketing alignment impact the bottom line?
3. Incongruent goals: Lack of shared, meaningful
metrics:
Although sales and marketing
teams are both charged with As with incongruent goals,
driving and sustaining dissimilar metrics, different
business success, they often revenue targets, indefinite
have goals that are sub-sets of reporting allow sales and
each other marketing teams to go in
different directions
Disconnected processes, People differences and
technologies and data: teamwork challenges:
The Sales teams, most often, is
Sales is usually seen paid when the deal is closed
concentrating their efforts in (as per incentives), but the
building relationships on a Marketing teams, who are
first hand basis responsible for handing over
Marketing on the other hand ‘Sales-Ready’ leads to dept,
prefers automated and are usually paid a fixed salary
scalable processes to be able
to reach wider
4. In a typical B2B Scenario, Sales should begin with
listing down the targets and defining the objectives
Marketing should allocate their work and targets
depending upon the targets sets by Sales
Only after a definite approval from the
management including a sales and marketing
representative, can both work together
contributing to the regarded Firm
Hence, in this collaborative process no one
particular team may necessarily take the lead but
both sales and marketing and expected to co-
operate
5. The Debate over Quality & Difference over Lead Nurturing
Quantity
6. Connection Between Marketing and Sales: If Sales and Marketing are
known to have something in common then that is none other than ‘Leads’
Leads have proven to bring the two departments closer in terms of
setting similar targets and achieving them
Sales needs to recognize that Lead Generation Management technology
and content-based Lead Nurturing are best practices to achieving Above
the Funnel goals
To make these tactics successful however, Marketing must align to the
way their Sales team goes to market
7. If there is one solution that can help
marketing and sales teams integrate,
it is automated lead management
Also, the sales and marketing
automation software team together
decide what would be the ideal lead
score that can be considered sales-
ready
By doing this, the gap is further
reduced and better alignment
between both teams can be achieved
Although this increases efficiency, it
also reduces personalization to a
certain extent hindering the sales’
high-touch method of approach
8. Sharing common goals and compensation plans for marketing
and sales is absolutely critical because it effects the bottom
line
This enables closeness amongst the two departments and may
ensure a long term healthy relationship rewarding the
company with desired returns
But certain things have to be kept in mind while sharing goals
and responsibilities:
Budgets allocated to the marketing department may depend on the
revenue generated previously converted leads.
Individual compensation plans may be used as incentives differently for
each respective department
Conversation of leads may include sharing incentives to both
departments
Hence, to safely conclude, sharing common goals and
compensation plans may be a variable depending on the
budget
Also budget constraints may be set depending on profit or loss
of the previously generated leads
9. Measurement through all implementations is king. The effective
mantra is to measure well and measure often
When your marketing and sales software feed data into each other,
you can measure a single grouped set of data
This will enable your extended teams to know which approach,
campaign, or materials is most effective
This ongoing measurement enables the sales and marketing
disciplines to work as an ever-improving team and helps alignment
10. Aligning marketing and sales makes good
business sense and ultimately improves the
bottom line
A study conducted on sales effectiveness
found that companies that had strong
collaboration between these two functions
achieve higher sales effectiveness
By improving marketing and sales alignment
in a relatively quick period of time, the
company can begin to reap the benefits of
more revenue and profits
For many companies this additional boon in
sales more than justifies making the effort.
Higher throughputs means the company is
spending its money a lot more wisely than it
usually did
This helps cost-cutting in the appropriate lines
Eg: Leads that haven’t been converted but
have potential can be put back into the
marketing funnel instead of being discarded
11. NexSales is a demand gen consulting and delivery firm
At NexSales, we enable complex sales and marketing solutions to help clients meet their
aggressive growth needs by leveraging our deep domain experience, proprietary database
and innovative technology. We provide solutions in the areas of database, lead generation,
digital marketing and social media marketing
We’ve helped our clients achieve 30-80% growth in their sales pipeline while empowering
them with leading edge practices.
www.nex-sales.com
