A take on

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?

Incongruent goals: Although sales and marketing

teams are both charged with driving and sustaining business success, they often have goals that are sub-sets of each other

Disconnected processes, technologies and data: Sales is usually seen

concentrating their efforts in building relationships on a first hand basis

Marketing on the other hand prefers automated and scalable processes to be able to reach wider

Lack of shared, meaningful metrics: As with incongruent goals,

dissimilar metrics, different revenue targets, indefinite reporting allow sales and marketing teams to go in different directions

People differences and teamwork challenges: The Sales teams, most often, is

paid when the deal is closed (as per incentives), but the Marketing teams, who are responsible for handing over ‘Sales-Ready’ leads to dept, are usually paid a fixed salary

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

The Debate over Quality & Quantity

Difference over Lead Nurturing

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

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

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

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

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

NexSales is a demand gen consulting and delivery firmAt 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 marketingWe’ve helped our clients achieve 30-80% growth in their sales pipeline while empowering

them with leading edge practices.

www.nex-sales.com