Imagine you’re on a golf course. Standing at the tee and observing the flag in the distance. The distance between you and the flag is 400m.
Launch a decent drive (first shot using a club called a ‘driver’) and you have a great chance of chipping and putting your ball to the flag. The first shot makes up most of the distance. The subsequent shots become easier if the first shot is on target.
The marketing and sales functions in a #business works in a similar way.
Marketing is the first shot. Cover the biggest distance by moving your ideal target market through the various stages of awareness.
Your sales process then takes over for the subsequent shots.
If your first shot is way off target, your subsequent shots have an uphill struggle.
The key to better business outcomes is aligning the #marketing and #sales processes to work together.
And here are 5 key tips to achieving better business outcomes:
- Identify the minimum level of awareness of your ideal prospect. People go through different levels of awareness, starting from some level of problem awareness right through to becoming solution aware, product aware and brand aware. Does your sales team need your inbound prospects to be problem aware or solution aware? Match the level of awareness required for your sales process with the level of awareness that marketing activities are targeting. If the sales team needs solution aware prospects, but the marketing efforts are delivering problem aware prospects, then there will be an issue. Resolve this by bringing your marketing and sales teams together to identify and agree the level of awareness of your ideal prospect.
- Define the criteria that makes up a qualified lead. There’s nothing worse than the marketing team thinking that they’ve delivered great leads but the sales team thinks they’re rubbish. The best way to navigate this is to bring your marketing and sales teams together to define and agree a minimum criteria for what constitutes a qualified lead.
- Use a lead management system (or a CRM) to track and manage all inbound leads. Establish simple processes for tagging and categorizing leads to track lead quality. This information should be visible to both the marketing and the sales teams.
- Follow up your prospects. Ensure the sales team has disciplined processes to ensure that leads are followed up consistently. Leverage help from your marketing team to create lead nurturing strategies that complement the sales team’s processes. This will ensure that leads aren’t ‘falling through the cracks’ due to a lack of follow up.
- Set up simple sales and marketing dashboards that track relevant KPIs that are co-owned between marketing and sales. Bring both teams together to review these metrics. This will avoid the common behaviour of marketing teams optimising for reduced lead acquisition costs at the expense of lead quality. Both metrics are important levers in the ROI equation.
If you’d like more information or free templates to help implement these tips in your business, feel free to Request a Strategy Session. We’d be glad to share helpful templates, obligation free.
Here’s to building better businesses, together!
