Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Strategies for Maximum Results

Teach your sales and marketing departments to work together, and you’ll have more success.  Angela Leavitt, chief mojo-making officer at Mojo Marketing (News - Alert), says you need to bring those Best Frenemies together to improve sales revenue. She spoke about the topic at ITEXPO in Fort Lauderdale yesterday.

Your goal is to eliminate the tug-of-war that often exists between marketers and sales people. “Sales and marketing love to point fingers at each other,” says Leavitt, who provides full-service marketing for telecom, IT and cloud services.

To remedy that situation, you need to link marketing and sales closer together. Aligning your marketing and sales teams helps smooth the transfer of potential clients from the marketing staff to the sales staff.

People are getting more than ¾ of the way through the sales cycle – deep into the funnel – before they’re contacted by sales. If sales and marketing are more closely connected, leads can reach the sales team more efficiently, Leavitt told the assembled crowd.

Establishing closer contact between marketing and sales leads to more closed deals. Leavitt offered four steps to getting your sales team and marketing team on the same page together:

1. Set common goals. Get your marketing team and your sales team to strategize together. Get your teams to agree on targets, goals and plans.
2. Execute your plan. Establish processes that can be used by all. Use automation software that increases your insights into your database.
3. Measure and analyze your results. List common objections and reasons for lost deals. Has your customer profile changed? Talk about what works, too.
4. Communicate consistently with your teams. Establish regular meetings between the two groups, celebrate wins to reinforce the positive.

She also favors the tactic of “mutual shadowing,” where marketing staff joins sales staff for their regular duties – and vice versa. Cross-training your marketing and sales people improves the continuity between the two groups, she notes.

Leavitt says her data shows that 73% of leads are never contacted. As a result, 70% of leads never convert. Sales and marketing need to agree on how your company is going to nurture its leads. The companies that nurture well are going to win,” Leavitt says.

Edited by Erik Linask