Marketing and Sales Alignment: Challenges & Solutions

Sales and Marketing teams have traditionally worked as separate entities. The marketing team would identify prospects and filter them based on their readiness to buy, and pass them on to the sales team. The sales team would then take over and begin their efforts to close deals. However, as businesses matured, they started to recognize the need for collaboration between marketing and sales.

According to the American Marketing Association, “Sales and Marketing need to be integrated in order to build customer relationship, enhance brand, capitalize on leads, improve market share and to boost revenue”. While businesses do realize this, they are often unable to attain such an alignment because they face certain fundamental challenges in this regard:

• The Blame Game: Sales teams are driven by a quantitative objective. They are under immense pressure to demonstrate revenue. So most often than not they blame the marketing team for producing useless leads or for not producing enough leads. Similarly, marketing teams tend to think that they know better than the sales team, about prospects. And they in turn blame the sales team for not following-up on hot leads. This is the most common difference existing between sales and marketing teams in every organization. If both these teams collaborate and define leads and set expectations, this challenge can be effectively overcome.
• The Difference over Lead Nurturing: While marketing teams believe in strengthening prospect relationship, sales teams are always in a hurry to close the deal. In the recent years businesses have widely accepted the importance of lead nurturing for business growth. But sales teams are often unaware of its benefits. So, there is a pressing need to educate them about why lead nurturing is needed and typically how long should leads be nurtured.
• The Debate over Quality & Quantity:  This is another major challenge. Marketing teams believe that they always do a good job by providing more than the number of leads that a sales team needs, to meet their target. But sales teams always criticize marketing teams for not providing good quality leads. This ongoing debate has only widened the sales and marketing divide.

Marketing Automation: The Undisputed Solution

If there is one solution that can help marketing and sales teams integrate, it is Marketing Automation. The latest generation in automation software is based on the 2.0 platform, which offers advanced capabilities to make collaboration between marketing and sales much easier. These tools offer superior lead intelligence by identifying, capturing and converting leads into sales opportunities. They track visitor behavior on the website and measure their intent, interest levels etc. Based on these details, the leads are scored. And based on the scores, marketing teams can decide whether they have to be nurtured further, or handed over to the sales team. Only those leads with the highest score are taken over by sales and therefore the probability of conversion is very high.

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.

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Effective Lead Nurturing For Increased Sales

Getting potential customers to come to your website and register does not guarantee increased sales. Not all prospects are ready to buy, but that does not mean that they will never buy. You need to keep these prospects engaged if you want them to ultimately buy. It is important to nurture them so that eventually they become your customers.

The concept of lead nurturing has become immensely popular with marketers today.  It can be thought of as the art of keeping your prospects engaged with the right kind of information at the right time so that ultimately you are the choice the prospect makes.  Lead nurturing is the process of developing a positive long-term relationship with leads/prospects through meaningful dialogue, keeping their attention with a series of time-appropriate messages and then tracking their development into sales opportunities.The information or communication sent to the customer needs to be appropriate and timely or your customer may lose interest in your product and make your marketing efforts ineffective. Lead nurturing programs have become much simpler to design and launch with marketing automation.

According to Aberdeen Research, implementing a lead nurturing practice can yield a 50%+ increase in sales-ready leads, making a large impact in a company's revenue and growth goals. 

Based on lead nurturing, marketers categorize leads based on their sales readiness and pass on to the sales team, only those leads that are ready to buy. And the prospects that are not ready are further nurtured to create interest in the products or services offered. The sales team, on the other hand, makes great progress as they have only hot leads to follow up on. And if any hot lead turns warm, it is directed back to the marketing team to be nurtured. Thus, with lead nurturing, enterprises can ensure maximum sales success.

Highly Effective Stages of Lead Nurturing

Some of the best practices in lead nurturing that can bring about the desired results are:

1. Map out a Strategy – Chalk out a strategy that can help you keep your leads interested. Plan out the kinds of content that need to be delivered to the prospect as a part of lead nurturing program, keeping in mind their interests. The kinds of content that can be sent include white papers/articles, case studies, data sheets, videos, podcasts, webinars, links to specific industry news/resources and interviews with experts/executives.
2. Personalize Your Interaction – Personalizing emails is a good strategy. It kind of breaks the ice. Send relevant content based on the interest in the prospect. You have a much higher chance of keeping your prospect in the fold if you provide information they want.
3. Create a Lead Nurturing Schedule – Develop a schedule for sending out information to the prospect. This helps you keep track of where you are in the lead nurturing funnel.
4. Reinforce Brand/Product – The prospect has shown interest in your product, and it is up to you to keep his attention with timely messages. Share white papers, videos or demos about your brand or product. Develop case studies and share success stories with clients. In this way you will be able to create an image about your brand.
5. Strengthen Relationship – Once the image is built, you need to strengthen it and maintain that interest further. You now need to send a controlled communication to influence the prospect’s buying decision.
6. Close the Deal – Once the prospect is purchase ready, it is time to pass them on to the sales team to close the deal. This can be done with offers of a free trial, and sending references.

In going through the above stages of lead nurturing, you can build up a relationship with the prospect and seamlessly progress to making them potential customers. These best practices can help marketers achieve better sales and improve ROI.

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