Janet Johnson, Mambo Media’s Chief Marketing Officer, discusses how aligning marketing and sales can drive leads, increase sales and grow revenue for your business. Watch the video, or read below for key insights and takeaways.
Why is it important to bring sales and marketing departments together?
Gartner has predicted that within five years people will make it 85% of the way through their decision making process on any product before they actually talk to a human. We see that marketing is responsible for way more of that nurturing, providing the kind of information we have to feed and educate people on before sales will even begin to have a relationship with a potential customer. Alignment between the sales team and marketing team is very important because expectations have to be set up, such that marketing knows how far through the funnel they have to take a lead before a sales person will actually pick up the phone and call; or whether the sales person actually is involved in the product purchase process until the very very end where they need to close.
Why should sales and marketing speak a common language?
One of the things that’s really important between marketing and sales is a common language. Often times the things that connect us are the things we need to agree on, which is: lead quality, lead quantity, what is a lead? Is a lead an inquiry or is it an opportunity? Is it a marketing qualified lead? Is that the same as a sales qualified lead or even a sales accepted lead? These are the kinds of things that we have to really come to an agreement on before we can actually start counting how many leads there are in a system. That’s the beauty in being able to use technology, like marketing automation systems, in order to align marketing and sales to deliver the business value to the business as were selling any kind of product. Whether it is a B2B product, B2C product, technology, or even sippy cups—it doesn’t matter! We have to have metrics and we have to have a common language in order to fulfill the obligations whether you’re on marketing or on sales.
What do you risk if sales and marketing aren’t aligned?
If sales and marketing aren’t aligned, then you risk having a little bit of in-fighting and tension. When there is in-fighting people take their eye off the ball. You can’t have that in today’s business environment that is increasingly competitive and increasingly volatile in terms of speed and velocity with which we have to make decisions. That is a huge risk to the business, especially as we are looking to be more predictable the revenue stream needs to be much more projectable.
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