Using Marketing Automation to align Sales and Marketing

Marketing Automation (MA) has been a hot topic for some time now and rightly so.  When you align both Sales and Marketing you will transform both departments. According to a report by Aberdeen Research, companies that are best-in-class at aligning marketing and sales experienced an average of 20% GROWTH in annual revenue, compared to a 4% DECLINE in laggard organizations!

Here I will outline how I recently assisted a B2B company, who sell big ticket IT solutions and how I helped them migrate from a traditional sales and marketing approach to align sales and marketing in line with best in class organizations.

Where did we start?

Typically, Sales and marketing alignment begins with the leadership team defining shared definitions, so they will start by looking at creating a single understanding of what it means inside their business when they refer to terms such as “Qualified leads” and “Opportunities”.

After the leadership team has worked on defining shared definitions it is time to get more granular and consider the stages of the new sales funnel and decide what Marketing and Sales will do at each stage.  This involves deciding:

• What Marketing Channels to choose from and when / where to use these channels as part of a Multi-Channel campaign (e.g. Email, SMS, Social, In App)
• How will they segment prospect/customers in your database?
• How will prospects be lead scored based on good/bad demographics and good/bad behavior in relation to engaging with various marketing channels including but not limited to Trade shows, social, website, email and other on line content
• How and when does a qualified lead get passed to sales and what internal SLA’s will you put in place? (e.g. How long to wait for a new qualified lead to be marked as contacted before a process kicks to enforce lead follow up)
• What happens with a lead that is passed to Sales but does not progress to a won deal? (These leads often go into a black hole for companies that do not implement a personalized lead nurturing strategy)
• What are the various Nurturing buckets that need to be created for personalized Marketing?
• What sales process do we need to integrate into the CRM to help sales people take SQL’s (Sales Qualified Leads) to WON business?

What was the starting point?

This company was using a traditional Sales and Marketing approach and losing ground to the competition year on year.  They had tried various fixes including:

• Bringing their outsourced lead generation team back in house
• High end sales training
• Sales and Marketing consultancy
• New Website
• Investment in an ESP (Email Service Provider)

There were some short term gains but none of these initiatives had a lasting positive impact on the business and were not generating a steady stream of leads. This directly led to missed targets and low morale/Churn in the lead generation and Sales team.  During their annual sales and marketing retreat the long term prospects were considered bleak.

The below is a graphical representation of their legacy Sales and Marketing Model

It was decided during the off site session to try something new and hire an experienced Digital Marketing Director.

 The new model

Under the new model, with the guidance and leadership offered by the new Digital Marketing Director, Marketing implemented a system that engages throughout the sales funnel through multiple channels with personalized targeted marketing content. Personalized content was the key and this included White papers, Bloggs, Videos, E-Books and regular offerings of thought leadership through Webinars delivered though multiple channels including Email, Social and SMS.  

 The below is a graphical representation of their New Sales and Marketing Model

STAGES DEFINED UNDER THE NEW MODEL

Names stage

This is the earliest stage and involves generating interest and awareness in what the company does.  The key objective is to get more email addresses so that these can be marketed to on an ongoing personalized manner.  Both Marketing Automation and the lead generation team have a role to play at this stage.

• Marketing Automation: Marketing Automation will be used to generate new names through Blogging about what they sell and also social posting, listening and sharing.  
• Lead Generation team: note that the lead generation team is active with early stage prospecting but they will use a smaller net (Only do early stage outbound activities to specific industries and key accounts). 

Engaging Stage

The goal at this stage is twofold

1. To keep prospects engaged with the brand until they are ready to speak to a sales person. This stage is also used for prospects that have gone through the sales process but were not yet ready to buy now. It is important to have plenty of engaging high quality content based on the verticals and personas that are being targeted.
2. To accelerate those leads that are the correct target and are showing genuine buying behavior (an example might be an IT Director looking at the pricing page of a particular product 3-4 times).

Qualify stage

The goal here is for the Lead Generation Team to qualify those leads that have been deemed ready by the Marketing Automation system known as MQL’s (Marketing Qualified Leads) and further qualify them so that the MQL becomes what Marketing deems is a valid SQL (Sales Qualified Lead). 

The marketing Automation system will integrate into the CRM so that the Lead Generation Team has the relevant insights into prospect behavior so that they can have warmer more meaningful conversations and qualify leads to be valid (or not) SQL’s quicker.  

Manage Deal and Closed WON stage

At this point Sales will decide whether the SQL will turn into a valid Deal and will be managed according to a CRM integrated sales process including the Close Plan.  Also new relevant personalized Marketing Programs will engage with the new customers through a relevant customer nurturing program.

 IN CONCLUSION

There is a lot involved in correctly aligning Sales and Marketing and Sales is a business objective that weaves in and out of any modern Digital Marketing strategy.  Alignment between Marketing and Sales is not achieved overnight but is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. When marketing and sales teams unite around a single revenue cycle, they dramatically improve marketing and sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line revenue growth.