How to align sales and marketing (and why the funnel matters)

How to align sales and marketing

Why is alignment so important?

I’d worked in sales for three years and, at the time, felt that marketing was disconnected from the issues our customers faced. I still see this happening today, and it is damaging to growth.

Forrester Research quantified the cost of misalignment in their 2020 report, ‘A Sales Executive’s Perspective on Alignment: Outdated Stereotypes, Pipeline and Revenue Goals for Marketing’, which said that alignment between sales and marketing allowed these organizations to grow 19% faster than they otherwise would.

Putting this in perspective, aligning sales and marketing can increase your revenue 2.4-fold over a five-year period. Even without getting other fundamentals right.

Issues caused by non-alignment

My next role was in marketing with a fast-growing tech organization (a path I’ve never regretted, thanks to some great mentors) that placed us at the heart of the sales floor. This was a great idea - if sales and marketing aren’t working as a team, it’s almost inevitable they will take different paths.

Without this alignment, you will likely find:

          1.      Sales and marketing aiming at slightly (or completely) different customers.

         2.     Customers getting confused by different messages, depending on who they speak to or what they read.

      3.     A lack of guidance to support prospects to the point they see (and, ideally, realize) the value of your solution quickly.

      4.     Making a sale that doesn’t meet a customer’s needs – I plan to write a subsequent blog post on this issue.

This leads to:

i)      Higher costs per qualified lead.

ii)      Longer than expected sales cycles.

iii)     Customers need high levels of pre-sales support to get them going.

iv)     Higher customer attrition rates.

How to align your sales and marketing

Make sure you have an agreement between sales and marketing on:

a.     Which customers are most likely to buy from you.
- see our blog post on this topic, ‘Defining your Ideal Customer Profile’

b.     The business issues/pains they are trying to solve with your solution.
- see ‘Why have a Key Messaging Document?’

 c.    Who within those customers is involved in the buying decision (including influencers)?
- ditto

 d.    The reasons customers buy from you rather than your competitors.
- ditto

 e.     Where (and why) customers get stuck in the buying cycle.
- see ‘How to accelerate your sales cycle’.

 f.     Ensure you are working to the same definitions of the different stages of the sales funnel.
- see below

g.     Agree on the definition of success. Measure these KPI’s against each stage of the funnel and benchmark them against your competition.

Aligning the sales and marketing funnel

The sales and marketing funnel is an internal map that shows where you believe prospects have reached in their buying journey.

The funnel makes it possible to track customer progress and check there are sufficient pipeline opportunities at any given stage to generate the desired revenue. Equally, prospects who have stayed longer than expected at a given point in the sales process may have got stuck and could use some help.

Different organizations may have different naming conventions (another reason it’s so important to get agreement on definitions from sales and marketing), but here’s a general high-level guide:

1. Awareness – Prospects are aware of a business issue or need.

Prospects are aware of a business issue (example: “Our customers are unhappy that engineers are consistently late for appointments”) or business benefit (example: “Would it help if you could give your customers a guaranteed one-hour window when your engineers will arrive?”).

[Side note: I have seen the ‘awareness’ stage alternatively described as an awareness of your product instead of awareness of their underlying business issue. However, this doesn’t make sense to me as it misses the beginning of your customers’ journey].

2. Interest – A prospect has started to interact with you to get further information.

They may have heard of you through news articles, web searches, events, information from industry analysts, or someone with previous experience with your product. All of these are great channels to build awareness of your product.

Typically, customers at this stage will look at your website, read product reviews and industry analyst papers, and speak to existing customers.

Ranking highly for the key search engine terms your prospects use, interacting with analysts, creating sponsored content and supportive blog posts, and being seen in the press regularly helps. Ultimately, though, nothing drives awareness like honed sponsored content using the relevant messaging and channels for your audience (just ensure any ad spend directly drives revenue, not merely awareness).

3. Consideration – Prospects at this stage evaluate the potential solutions in more detail to narrow their selection. Increasingly, they prefer to do their research online, speaking to sales towards the end of this part of their buying journey.

This stage can be subdivided (which helps when tracking where prospects are, what information they are likely to need, and the overall health of your sales and marketing pipeline):

i.        If the prospect matches your Ideal Customer Profile, they meet the criteria as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) for retargeting and ongoing marketing engagement.

ii.        If they meet the criteria for sales acceptance (this is often done automatically by watching for certain triggers on engagement), they become a Sales Accepted Lead (SAL).

iii.        If sales feel there is an opportunity, it becomes a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL).

Free trials are often offered to prospects at this stage, but try to ensure the trial goes smoothly! I prefer the ‘rapid start’ style programs mentioned below over trials; however, trials guided through customer success tools such as Gainsight can be very helpful here (as opposed to leaving customers to their own devices).

Rapid start programs can be considered as smaller prototype implementations with a narrow scope of focus that demonstrate business value in a relatively short period of time.

They should be priced low level, covering your costs while getting customer buy-in. This can de-risk the project from the prospect's perspective, giving both sides a successful outcome.

Throughout this stage, it’s worth continuing to engage with the customer through sales and marketing. Marketing can help by showing how else the customer can maximize the product's benefits while tracking the content their customer is reading.

4. Engagement – Prospects at this stage seek further evidence that the solution will deliver an ROI in their environment. They will likely want to examine proof points and discuss pricing and discounts.

At this point, if you’ve run a successful rapid-start program, you’ll have a significant head-start over your competitors as they should already be getting value from your product, which they are unlikely to want to give up. This also serves as a helpful proof point.

5. Decision – Prospects at this stage are ready to decide which solution they will adopt.

They might want to negotiate pricing at this stage; however, consider that professional buyers may play one vendor off against the other. They may have chosen you as their preferred choice or could be using your offering as leverage for a better deal from their preferred option.

6. Nurture – Once you win a customer, it becomes important to retain them - it’s far more expensive to win a customer than to retain one!

This means staying in touch to ensure they get the maximum benefit from their investment. This interaction can move them to the point where they’re happy to support customer references, case studies, press interviews, etc.

Summary

In summary, to ensure sales and marketing work effectively together, make sure they are:

·      Agreed on the product or solution messaging

·      Working towards winning the same target customers

·      Using the same definitions of stages of the sales and marketing funnel

·      Measure and benchmark to improve (to prove that, overall, what you’re doing works)

If you would like our expert help implementing this or other sales and marketing processes, feel free to book a free advisory discussion to move forward.