Organizations have paid the price long enough for the weak processes between marketing and sales. According to Aberdeen Group, the biggest gap between sales performers and under-achievers lies in integrating sales intelligence with sales and marketing systems. And Sirius Decisions says only a miniscule 8% of B2B companies report good alignment between marketing and sales teams.
Marketing and sales – you are the weakest link!
Take a look at the well-known British game show for a few criteria that determine the statistical weakest link:
Most money lost for the team by answering questions of high values incorrectly
Number of incorrect answers in the round
Time spent/wasted on answering a particular question
Put into context for marketing and sales:
With inaccurate and incomplete customer profiles, sales opportunities can be missed – losing money for the team
Without insight into what happens to leads after they’re passed to sales, lead nurturing and prospect qualification can be incorrect
Without streamlined and automated processes between marketing and sales, valuable selling time can be spent/wasted
Strengthening the Link with Shared Insights
By integrating marketing automation with new, real-time sales engagement analytics, organizations can remove this misalignment. With more synchronized teams and integration of systems across business groups, organizations can streamline and improve internal communications to increase productivity.
Real-time engagement analytics that are available today deliver more complete customer profiles than ever before. By sharing this data across marketing teams and front-line reps, organizations can break down the silos and benefit from a more accurate and consistent view of customers.
Marketing: Bank on Better Lead Scoring and Prospect Qualification
By monitoring sales efforts in real time to see what interests prospects, marketing can provide more value to sales teams through more consistent messaging. With increased customer insight, marketing can also quickly change messages to bring more value to the organization. By integrating marketing and sales systems, these changes can be made throughout the whole buying process – versus just at the beginning.
Additionally, integration between marketing automation and sales engagement systems can generate new leads for marketing – faster. When sales documents are re-shared with additional contacts, those leads become automatically shared and synchronized with existing systems, so everyone – including marketing – has a unified, real-time view and can quickly see any new stakeholders.
This capability is particularly useful for large, complex deals that involve many decision-makers – so that other players can be identified and nurtured through the process.
Sales: Bank on Real-time Visibility for Customized Engagement
Without the same access to digital insights as marketing, sales teams have been operating blindly. Today, that’s changing – driven in part by a sales environment that has been transformed by more informed consumers and exploding inside sales.
New sales engagement tools are now available that show how prospects interact with sales content on a very deep level. Sales reps can see precisely when a prospect opens a sales proposal and how long they view each page. By seeing how actively engaged a prospect is, sales reps can quickly and accurately rank top prospects.
They can get instant alerts when a prospect forwards a document – and immediately see the profile information for the recipient of the forwarded document. No more surprises when a new stakeholder you’ve never heard of shows up at the close of a deal!
For maximum value, these tools must integrate with existing marketing automation. By integrating emerging sales analytics tools with marketing automation, sales gets the most visibility – seeing what engages prospects very early on – so they can better understand when and how to reach out to prospects.
Personalization has become critical. According to research, 47% of best-in-class companies prioritize the importance of personalization of customer conversations. By tailoring and timing follow-up based on prospect engagement with content, sales teams can deliver more tailored and timely follow-up that’s been shown to close deals faster.
Raising the Jackpot with Integrated Marketing and Sales
With an aligned effort and access to the most complete insights, sales and marketing can work more closely to create a better customer profile, cultivate new opportunities, and drive revenue for the business.
Avoid the walk of shame.
Increase the insight that you need to be successful. Get all the high-value questions answered. And bank the most money for the team. Learn more at http://livehive.com/.
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