Developing smarketing, the alignment of sales and marketing, within your company is not always easy. Traditional thinking puts the sales and marketing teams at odds quite regularly, with both teams thinking that the other is out of touch with the big picture. These three basic steps will get your sales and marketing teams on the same page and working towards a common goal: generating quality leads that have a high conversion rate to closed business.
One of the biggest areas of disagreement between sales and marketing relates to the quality of leads. Sales will say that the leads passed to them by marketing aren't ready to buy and marketing will say that sales doesn't fall up with high-quality leads. The best way to bridge this gap is for sales and marketing to jointly develop definitions of the various lead stages. Senior management should "referee" this process to help bring the two departments to agreement. Specifically, the following two lead stages need to be defined.
Marketing qualified leads are leads that have exhibited characteristics that indicate that they are likely to purchase your company's products or services. Depending on the source, experts estimate that 75%-98% of visitors to your website aren't ready to buy. Marketing qualified leads are generally defined as leads that exceed a pre-determined lead score. Lead scoring is a process where points are assigned to a lead based on a number of factors including:
Once a lead has accrued a lead score that defines them as a marketing qualified lead, the marketing team has to do more research to make sure the lead is ready to pass to sales. Keep in mind that your lead score is an evolutionary process - you'll change point values and perhaps the MQL definition as you get feedback from the marketplace and your sales team.
Once a lead has been defined as marketing qualified, the marketing team needs to do some research to determine if the lead is a sales qualified lead (SQL). A sales qualified lead is ready for an outreach by your sales team. By definition, it is a warm lead. Marketing needs to research the lead to make sure it is truly ready for sales outreach. Here are some examples of the research necessary to determine if a lead is sales qualified.
We've discussed setting SMART goals for website visitors, leads and customers in previous articles. To briefly recap, SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely. An example of a SMART goal is to produce 100 sales qualified leads per month by 3d quarter of 2013. SMART goals for your inbound marketing program are developed by starting with your revenue goals and cascading down goals that support the revenue production. Here's an example of a service-level agreement for revenue production.
By going through this goal-setting process, you do a few things. First, you define clear goals for each step of the process that hold the responsible party accountable. Secondly, you test the validity of your goals. For example, if your SMART goals dictate that you need 10,000 website visitors per month to hit your goals and you currently have 500 visitors per month, your goal is most likely not achievable. In any case, this goal-setting process is crucial to achieving the return on your inbound marketing investment.
These processes, particularly the lead scoring definition, are rarely perfect when they're drafted. You should have regular growth meetings that include both sales and marketing to review what's worked and what hasn't and to make the necessary adjustments to your processes. As mentioned previously, I recommend that senior management be part of these meeting and arbitrate any disagreements.
These meeting should also review progress against goals. If any of the goals aren't being hit, you need to examine your tactics and adjust them accordingly. For example, if you're not hitting your web traffic goals, you might consider increasing your blogging frequency from twice weekly to daily.
Once you have broken down the barriers between sales and marketing, you will likely see an overall improvement in the operations of your business. However, the job does not finish here. It is important to make certain the two teams do not rebuild the barriers. Continuously analyze the flow information between both departments and make certain the information loop remains strong, and in turn the smarketing team will continue to enjoy success.