SEO, Google Ads, Social Ads, Landing Pages… Lead generation is often the number 1 objective of marketing. But, once these leads are generated, how are they tracked? Are they eventually won over by salespeople? Sometimes aligning marketing and sales is complicated. Thoughts in this article…
Marketing and Sales Alignment
While the ultimate goal, growing the company’s business, is the same, the goals of the marketing and sales teams are different. On the marketing side, lead generation is a priority and it is often on this metric: the number of MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads) from which marketing results will be judged.
On the business side, the objective would be to generate as much turnover as possible, either from opportunities (leads, prospects, etc.) or existing customers. All this, until the end of the relationship (sometimes several weeks or even months).
Finally, on the management side, the objective is to be able to monitor the overall results of operations, from the generation of the first lead to the signing of customers, and to measure the ROI of the entire system. Unfortunately, the lack of alignment between marketing and sales sometimes makes this difficult.
In particular, tensions often arise around CRMs that vendors are reluctant to update. Their main criticism of this type of tool is that it is designed for marketing and management and not for them – the sales people – who should still be their daily users.
So how do you align marketing and sales to achieve efficiency?
First, you have to understand that in general, the hardest part of teamwork is collaboration. between faction. However, for a lead generation marketing operation to be effective, real joint work between salespeople and marketers is required. Make sure we generate quality leads for salespeople and ensure the baton is passed on correctly. The most important is the junction phase between 2 teams. We often talk about it, but it is necessary to align the teams on a General Purpose Operation success.
So the technical tools are also extremely important to allow good collaboration, you need a system suited to different profiles. Typically, the complexity of the tools puts sales teams off and reduces their ability to provide information about their prospects. They find the operation time-consuming and unnecessary. Who wants to complete dozens of fields to validate the follow-up of their work?
On the marketing side, the need for CRM is high as there is a need to manage large amounts of data. You can also use the tool to create landing pages, enrich data, automate emails, and more.
On the business side, exchanges with prospects are above all manual as they require very personal answers and you need a tool that can work smoothly with this constraint.
You have to understand that we have a marketing team on the one hand that needs a tool that manages a lot of data and a sales team on the other that needs to follow a set of individual processes. However, in practice, it is often marketing that determines the choice of equipment and sales representatives are called to use it and fill it in when it does not suit their needs.
Result : Somewhere between marketing and sales, many leads are lost, reducing the value of the effort put into action.
It is therefore essential to choose a system that makes it possible – easily and in good conditions – to deliver the leads generated by marketing to salespeople and then help them move forward in the sales process, converting them into customers. ,
So the application should allow the salesperson
- Freezing Possibilities Different From Qualified Lead
- Manage Leads.
- Follow up on reminders effectively and define the next step.
- Take a look at the current business pipeline.
- Measure business performance.
You need a system that will make their life easier and hence motivate them to use it.
Prepare Yourself to Be Effective: Marketing CRM Vs Commercial CRM
If the number of leads and prospects to follow is limited, a well-constructed shared Excel file is a solution to start. However, a CRM-type SaaS tool needs to be put in place quickly to facilitate activity monitoring.
There are, ultimately, 3 different uses behind the term CRM:
- CRM Marketing: It is used to propose customized offers to each of them to the customer base or prospects, ultimately to generate new sales.
- Customer Support: This means being able to respond to customer problems in the best possible way and have easy access to information related to them and their history.
- Sales Support or Commercial CRM, here it is about turning prospects into customers.
If the first two cases clearly require structured information on the customer and therefore as soon as the number of customers becomes significant, the implementation of a CRM, the last case, is different from that of a commercial CRM. It is different because in order to manage business prospecting we have to deal not with customers but with prospects.
Source: nocrm.io
For traditional CRM, which is often oriented towards marketing or customer support, everything will revolve around the customer, whereas business functions will be oriented around prospects. This usually means that the salesperson, in order to start working on a prospect, will have to fill out a lot of fields with traditional CRM.
When choosing a tool, integrating the sales team into the selection and favoring a CRM-oriented “sales support” is essential if you want the tool to be fully adopted. We will also ensure that business opportunity creation is as easy as possible. If you study the big CRMs on the market from this angle, they’re often gassy jobs, which certainly makes sense for companies with over a hundred employees and a real ability to customize tools, but Which are not very effective for VSE/SME
One of the solutions for VSEs/SMEs is to have 2 specialized (and often cheap) SaaS devices that talk to each other. Goal: Optimizing a tool for the data layer so that marketing can create and monitor a tool for acquisition tasks and sales people, focused on the ease of use and ease of use of sales process monitoring so that they don’t have to waste their time Fallen. Knowing that operationally, they are the ones who will be working on these devices on a daily basis.
Take a look at nocrm.io which provides a well designed guide to take stock of business requirements and business prospecting software.
To finish
At the end of this article, here are two important things to remember for greater efficiency:
1: Be sure to communicate regularly with sellers, marketers and management. It is meant to constantly discuss the real needs of everyone and thus gradually adapt the processes so that everyone can work efficiently and above all in an aligned manner.
2: Simplify various processes as much as possible to increase efficiency and pay utmost attention to the transition phase between teams.