When marketing and sales aren't working together, it shows. Beyond that palpable tension in the office when a marketing team member walks past a salesperson's desk, misalignment has serious bottom-line consequences. According to Aberdeen Group, companies with poor marketing and sales alignment saw a 7 percent decrease in annual revenue. But companies with good alignment saw a 20 percent increase.
The primary problem isn't just that sales and marketing don't communicate. As this Forbes article points out, marketers and salespeople often don't want to communicate. Sales is a money-in team; marketing is a money-out team. Because sales doesn't see actual results from marketing, sales doesn't give marketing the recognition it deserves as part of the sales process. And who gets the pat on the back from the CEO? Sales, of course.
When marketing and sales people accept each other's roles, it's easier to jointly create a plan for managing leads. Here's how it works:
Before you move into processes, everyone needs to understand each others' goals. Whether it's landing one big fish or scooping up as many guppies as possible, sales needs to clearly state what they're fishing for. Once marketing knows exactly what sales is going after, they can focus their efforts on achieving that now-mutual goal.
The two stages in the funnel that marketing and sales need to agree on completely are "Marketing Qualified Leads" and "Sales Qualified Leads."
For MQLs, specific buyer traits should be agreed upon by both teams. This is different from company to company, but can include qualifiers such as a specific industry, title or company size. Combine that with specific actions, like a demo or consultation request. This can help you determine scoring criteria in Step 3.
For SQLs, sales needs to communicate which leads are qualified and sales-ready. Without this feedback, marketing cannot improve its efforts to provide sales with even better leads.
When implementing lead scoring, whether it is simple or complex, both sales and marketing should be aware of the actions that increase the lead score. What pages do web leads visit before they were closed by sales? How many forms did a lead fill out and what forms? And, of course, what actions or traits disqualify a web lead? Depending on the value of each action or trait, you can determine which leads get immediate attention and which leads are still evaluating.
The key here is to close the loop. Your marketing automation system needs to be able to recognize when a lead becomes a customer. Whether this is CRM software integration or a manual import of new customers on a regular basis, it's impossible to properly develop lead score without seeing the customer's journey.
Lead scoring is essential to the notification process. If your company uses a CRM software, leads can automatically be delivered to the CRM when they reach the appropriate score. Your CRM software can then put the lead in the appropriate salesperson's queue.
In addition, you can notify sales when an MQL or SQL reaches a specific score or fills out a specific form from your marketing automation software. This again can help sales determine which leads need contacted right away or followed-up with because of a new action on their part.
Either way, both teams need to agree on when sales receives a notification and/or when a lead is sent over to CRM software (or manually exported and sent to sales).
The final step is developing a process for those leads who aren't quite sales-ready. After the first sales team contact, they may discover the person isn't buying anything for six months or even a year. Sales shouldn't let this lead sit. Instead, marketing should receive this lead and continue the lead nurturing process.
Have you created a lead management plan? Tell us how you improved the process in the comments section below.
photo credit: Dr. Mark Kubert
Dan Stasiewski is an Enterprise Data Consultant at Kuno. When he's not talking about marketing data and trends, he's probably in a movie theater... or randomly breaking into song. You can connect with Dan via Twitter, LinkedIn or Google Plus.
