Study after study points to sales and marketing alignment as a key area for improvement in many organizations, which is not surprising when you consider the high cost of the sales and marketing disconnect. In CSO Insight's Performance Optimization survey, 50% of leads were reported to have been self-generated by sales reps. In addition, 20% of opportunities forecast to be won resulted instead in no decision-that is, no purchase ultimately being made. Pursuing these non-deals throughout the entire sales cycle (to forecast close) is a costly waste of resources.
These figures reflect an ongoing and increasing disconnect between sales and marketing when it comes to lead generation. According to CSO Insights 2010 Sales Performance Optimization Survey of more than 2800 Chief Sales Officers (CSO's), the single most important initiative to help CSO's achieve their #1 goal of improving lead generation is Sales and Marketing Alignment.
Sales executives are three times as critical as marketing execs about the quality of leads being generated by marketing. They are nearly twice as critical in assessing the quantity of leads marketing generates. One source of miscommunication is the lack of agreement about what constitutes a qualified lead for each company. This may vary between companies but should be clear and agreed upon within each company-including yours.
An opportunity for big returns exists when Sales and Marketing are aligned on lead generation tactics. When companies excel in their ability to properly identify which accounts to go after, and prioritize which opportunities need action, their win rates are up to ten percent higher. This translates into more revenue on the same number of deals and/or the need to generate fewer leads because of higher hit rates.
It's a given that better quality leads result in easier/better sales. It is also generally agreed that taking time away from selling to generate leads cuts into sales productivity. Closer alignment between sales and marketing could improve both of these factors and reduce the disconnect that exists today.
Sales and Marketing Alignment captures domain knowledge, product usage & company knowledge, sales knowledge along with proof points and solution summaries. These are generated are used directly in sales conversations and blogging around target buyer issues.
The Survey's authors strongly recommend top priority be given to Sales and Marketing Alignment as it is the easiest to do, with the lowest cost to implement and results in the highest impact on the organization.
The first step in improving lead generation and marketing performance is to thoroughly understand the needs and likely areas of interest of your target audience. This may sound obvious, but most Websites are inwardly focused on product and service features instead of engaging interested visitors around their issues.
When we truly understand the needs of our target buyers, we are in much stonger position to engage the buyer in conversations about their issues, which in turn enables us to create differentiation in the mind of the buyer
Inbound Sales Network's approach is to foster what we call "dynamic engagement", in which Marketing and Sales pass lead communication and qualification responsibility back and forth seamlessly, enabling the right level and mode of contact for each prospect at each phase of the engagement. At the simplest level, what this means is that Marketing can automate the process of nurturing a lead via email until qualifying criteria are met, at which point, Sales can be instantly notified of prospect interest, and lead status updated so that Marketing no longer sends email to a lead being actively worked by Sales. Similarly, if Sales finds that a qualified lead is not actually engaged, Sales can update the lead status, passing responsibility for "remarketing" back to Marketing. Lead qualifying criteria can be based on both factual information (industry, company size) but also on the prospect's online body language, including number of visits to the website, number of pages visited, length of the visit(s), and specific pages visited.