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DO YOU HAVEMARKETING AND

SALES ALIGNMENT?

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THE REALITY OF YOUR MARKETING & SALES FUNNEL

Sales and Marketing Alignment involves many things: Shared goals, common milestones and metrics, well-oiled business processes, and smart technology investments. But first and foremost, alignment is about one thing: communication. If sales and marketing divisions can’t learn how to work together as a single team, speak the same language, and exchange information freely, then technology will have little impact.

As marketing becomes more and more about engaging content, and sales becomes more and more about expertise; a new strategy and higher need for teamwork emerges.

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Traditional marketing and sales reporting fails to provide a real-time, unified view of your complete revenue funnel. FunnelWise integrates with Salesforce.com and marketing automation software to provide critical information that empowers you to improve your revenue results.

Where am I compared with where I need to be?

Am I speeding up or slowing down?

Is the ship sinking but I can’t see it yet?

Answering these questions is challenging due to the many moving parts, lack of alignment between marketing and sales teams, and the need for manual spreadsheet work to connect data from lead generation through closed won sales.

Neither marketing nor sales can achieve greatness on their own. FunnelWise seeks to solve this problem by addressing these three steps to improve your sales and marketing alignment:

Identify internal weaknesses

Settle on terminology, metrics and goals

Take advantage of technology to enhance the process

Solving these problem are some of the most important tactics you’ll accomplish with a successful sales and marketing alignment initiative.

WHAT SHOULD MARKETING & SALES ALIGNMENT LOOK LIKE?

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The simple truth is that sales and marketing divisions need to leverage each other’s core competencies to achieve true organizational goals.

But where do you begin?

FunnelWise integrates with Salesforce.com and marketing automation software to remove these barriers and support best practices for maximizing revenue performance, such as:

IDENTIFY YOUR INTERNAL WEAKNESSES

A shared visual blueprint for what your optimal revenue funnel should look like

• Most companies build spreadsheet models, and some don’t build anything at all!

• Best in class organizations create a shared visual blueprint that sets clear expectations for both marketing and sales

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Real-time visibility of how results compare to the plan & to past time periods

• Most organizations use stand-alone dashboards for marketing vs. sales, with marketing looking at “their” data and sales looking at “their” data

• Best in class organizations use a shared, unified view of the entire funnel

Detailed insight into the critical hand-off from marketing to sales (MQL to SQL)

• Most organizations lack clear insight into the MQL to SQL transition point

• Best in class organizations constantly monitor lead flow, conversion rates, lead response times, and number of touches to maximize their success rate

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It is too easy to see where this has failed – or maybe more applicable – is failing businesses. In most organizations, sales and marketing design their pipelines as separate processes. Leads get passed from marketing, and sales pursues those leads, but neither side really has much visibility into how the other side gets things done.

Regardless of your organization or industry, marketers should always pay attention to “batons” that cross functions. That’s because whenever two or more departments share ownership and responsibility, conditions are ripest for problems. This is especially true in the handoff between Marketing and Sales.

The process of handing off a lead from marketing to sales is critical to both sides. It’s the point where the marketing team proves its value, and where the sales team gets the raw material for closed deals.

So why do so many companies stumble over how they define a sales ready lead?

This is usually the underlying problem when marketing feels leads vanish into a black hole or when sales reps feel the leads they get from marketing are simply not qualified.Your sales and marketing teams will still have distinct responsibilities, from prospecting and qualifying at the top of the funnel to closing and maintaining relationships at the bottom. With a single pipeline, however, they’ll also understand how each stage in the process works – where each lead is in the process - and why each is critical to the business.

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LEAD SCORING

Lead scoring is a methodology for ranking leads in order to determine their sales-readiness. Leads are scored based on the interest they show in your business, their current position in the buying cycle, and the steps they have taken to engage your business. It helps companies prioritize their marketing and sales activity, and make their operations more efficient.

Keep in mind: Lead scoring is essential to strengthening your revenue cycle, but it is only effective if Sales and Marketing come together to define the scorecard.

Things like common definition and shared metrics are far more useful when your company treats its sales and marketing pipeline as a single, continuous process. This process helps extinguish the debate over lead quality and holds each department accountable. This process also will improve your reporting capabilities, as you will be able to clearly recognize and track metrics that matter.

Oftentimes, sales and marketing departments view their respective roles in the revenue generation process quite differently, and those differences will run deep. Realigning both teams toward the same revenue goal is a good first step, but the strategy for getting there needs to be defined together.

SETTLE ON TERMINOLOGY, METRICS & GOALS

Sales and Marketing need to come to the table – together – to clarify three keys:

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LEAD GENERATION METRICS – MQL AND SQL

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect that the marketing team has worked with, and feels is a good potential buyer. A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a prospect that the sales team believes is capable and interested in buying.

The problem is that, traditionally, Marketing defined the qualities of an MQL, and Sales decided what made someone an SQL. This partially explains why Sales sometimes feels that Marketing hands off unqualified leads – Marketing doesn’t always know what Sales is looking for!

Keep in mind: When both teams come together to outline what, specifically, qualifies a lead as an MQL or SQL, both teams are poised for greater efficiency.

SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENTS (SLAs)

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) isn’t just for technology providers. In fact, SLAs are an important way to define the relationship between your sales and marketing organizations, and to hold both sides accountable for their commitments.

Begin with a set of agreed-upon performance metrics and then set a series of targets such as:

1. The number of sales-ready leads to be delivered by the marketing team

2. The minimum amount of information to be collected before a qualified lead is passed to sales

3. The maximum time for a sales rep to follow up on a qualified lead

4. A timeframe for providing feedback to marketing on lead quality, especially regarding rejected leads, but it is only effective if Sales and Marketing come together to define the

The SLA you create will reflect your organization’s unique needs. Just remember that an SLA should be clear and simple; the goal is to encourage collaboration and maintain accountability, not to add a layer of bureaucracy to your business.

We believe the secret to a truly high-performance revenue engine is utilizing a unified dashboard, combined with the best practices we’ve written about.

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1. TOO MUCH TRAINING: Vice-presidents of Sales should not have to invest a great deal of time in learning how to use or understand sales reports.

2. LIMITED VISUALIZATION: When should you use a vertical bar chart versus a horizontal bar chart? Are dashboard gauges ever a good idea? Do pie graphs fit in anywhere? Salesforce.com provides some commonly used data visualization tools – unfortunately, their customers also commonly misuse them.

3. PROBLEMS SHARING REPORTS: The sales reports can only be sent to other paid users within Salesforce.com. If your CEO or board member isn’t a registered member, you’ll have to jump through several hoops just to circulate your report to them.

4. DIFFICULTIES WITH HISTORICAL DATA: One of the best benefits of CRM software is the capability to study historical data and make accurate forecasts using this data. The snapshot capabilities in Salesforce.com allow this, with one catch – they must be planned out and set well in advance. This means that sales managers must have the foresight to predict the information they need - before they actually need it.

There are a variety of marketing and sales automation tools available to enhance sales and marketing coordination. Marketing automation tools such as Marketo and HubSpot assist in lead generation, lead scoring and streamlining the lead-to-sales handoff process. Sales automation technology and CRM systems like Salesforce are designed to help boost sales productivity, increase sales performance visibility and manage sales contacts.

SETTLE ON TERMINOLOGY, METRICS & GOALS

What does Salesforce lack from a funnel analytics standpoint?

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What does Salesforce lack from a funnel analytics standpoint?

SIMPLE VIEW OF THE COMPLETE FUNNEL:

Marketing Automation tools give users a robust toolset for managing content and generating leads. However, it does not connect all of

the levels of the marketing and sales process in one

simple view.

INTEGRATING WITH SALESFORCE.COM IS

COMPLICATED:

When addressing the methods for connecting marketing nomenclature to Salesforce.com, most

marketing and sales leaders are frustrated. As a result,

they work around campaigns, accounts and contact record

issues inefficiently.

GOAL SETTING ISN’T REVENUE FOCUSED:

Many marketing automation tools are excellent at

measuring web traffic and lead generation, but fall shot of connection these

numbers to revenue goals.

There is a lot of value in these tools and they are extremely useful on their own. But when you integrate sales and marketing platforms together with our best practices; these technologies really shine. FunnelWise is designed to reliably sync leads and data from your marketing database with your CRM to provide the unified view that you are missing.

This way, marketers can assist in nurturing leads, shortening the sales cycle, while sales can use marketing-generated context for more relevant sales conversations. A closed-loop system moves leads seamlessly through the sales cycle, creating a smoother handoff and more consistent view of the entire marketing and sales program.

Integrated technology also provides the opportunity for full-funnel reporting and ROI measurement. Marketing and sales can view the complete customer lifecycle, from first interaction to most recent conversion.

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FunnelWise provides a unified view of your complete revenue funnel, bridging the gap between marketing and sales with a powerful and easy-to-use tool for marketing and sales leaders. It may seem prudent to assume that another tool or piece of software can help you solve these problems. After all, you were probably promised your investments in a CRM and marketing automation software would inherently solve them.

But –

FunnelWise was founded by a marketing and sales leader who successfully grew a sales organization from startup through IPO, and who has first-hand experience with the insights required for rapid revenue growth.

FUNNELWISE: MARKETING AND SALES ALIGNMENT SOFTWARE

In the course of developing the FunnelWise software, our team met with over 200 companies across North America to get feedback.

“This solution will speed up my business.” “I do not know any sales or marketing leader who would not want this tool.”

“This will provide tremendous improvement to our marketing and sales alignment.”

“For providing visibility and insights into our marketing and sales funnel, this is almost perfect.”

“As a marketer, this solves challenges we are trying to do with manual spreadsheets. It provides clear visibility into the overall journey of a customer from MQL to closed won.”

“I will look at this all the time. It will allow me to make daily adjustments to our marketing activities to make sure we are meeting our revenue goal.”

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ARE YOU READYto bridge the gap by viewing and managing your entire

revenue funnel from marketing through sales?

REQUEST A DEMO

If Marketing and Sales unify their separate tools to share the same revenue-generating goals, only then will they be on their

way to success in today’s crowded, fast-paced business world.