8 Steps to Sales and Marketing Alignment
June 28, 2012
There’s a lot of talk about the importance of sales and marketing alignment these days. In this video Stephanie Tilton, principal of Ten Ton Marketing, provides eight steps your company can take to make sure it actually happens.
Step 1: Identify your ideal customer by developing buyer personas: As with any sales or marketing initiative, it all starts with the customer. Tilton advises companies to build a rich understanding of exactly who they’re trying to reach and create a unified definition that both sales and marketing can agree on.
Step 2: Define qualified leads and establish processes for generating and nurturing them: Again, sales and marketing need to hammer out definitions – what exactly consitutes a qualified lead?
Step 3: Develop messaging and execute a more comprehensive but targeted marketing strategy: Messaging should be informed by each company’s buyer personas and integrated into both inbound and outbound marketing efforts.
Step 4: Create content that attracts, engages, and nurtures: Companies should adopt a two pronged approach. They should speak to prospects’ concerns and also resolve to share their expertise freely.
Step 5: Make sure content appears where prospects spend time online: Research can be conducted while developing buyer personas.
Step 6: Implement a process for lead qualification and follow up: Each marketing qualified lead needs to be verified. To do so, companies can utilize a variety of tools and techniques.
Step 7: Hand off leads to sales: Marketing should provide as much context as possible, including info collected in registration forms as well as records of the types of content the prospect has viewed/engaged with online.
Step 8: Close the loop: Companies need to take the time required to understand and follow up on the impact of combined sales and marketing efforts. While the ultimate goal is obviously closing deals in a lengthy B2B buying cycle there are other activites along the way can be measured, as well. How many outbound activities have turned into conversations? How many conversations turned into leads?