Intelligent Demand Generation / eTrigue Corporation

Marketing and sales alignment is always important, but even more so during this prolonged recession. Recent research findings support what we’ve been saying for a long time now: When your marketing and sales departments are able to collaborate and work together, your business thrives.

Companies whose marketing and sales departments are aligned show better performance in all important business parameters, including qualified leads, conversions, acquisitions, retention, average billing per customer and revenue.

So how do you make sure your marketing and sales are aligned? An easy way to do that is to use a good marketing automation system. Such a system makes it very easy for marketing and sales to collaborate because it enables important data to flow between the two departments, including information about leads. It also enables and encourages both organizations to agree on what constitutes a qualified lead, and to keep communication with leads consistent with the company’s general marketing messaging while allowing sales reps to personalize their messages to prospects.

Considering the importance of marketing-sales alignment to the bottom line of businesses, we find it surprising that the 2010 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study shows that only about one-third of surveyed sales executives said their sales and marketing departments work collaboratively; another one-third reported a “state of neutrality” between sales and marketing; and one-third reported no alignment at all.

To us, this is such a hugely missed opportunity for companies to make the most out of this recession and emerge from it as strong as they can.

On the flip side, for companies in the Marketing Automation space, this means that while we still have a lot of work to do to get the word out there about our solutions, there’s still so much we can do and so many companies we can help. So in a way, this is good news.

“Just like a good relationship between a man and a woman; when there is open communication and an honest desire to reach a common goal then your probability of success is much greater,” said Anthony DeAngelis, one of the participants in a recent LinkedIn discussion, and I couldn’t agree more.

I love the comparison between a personal relationship and sales/marketing relationship. In fact, I think B2B relationships – sales/marketing and also the relationship between businesses and prospects – are not that different than personal relationships, and the comparison is beneficial because it helps to explain, and to understand, why these relationships are so complex.

Aligning Marketing and Sales to agree on the same goal and to define that goal, then work together to achieve it, is a lot like aligning mutual expectations in a personal relationship.

Patiently nurturing leads in a long buying cycle, getting to know them better and tailoring your communication to their needs is very similar to nurturing a long-term personal relationship.

The idea is simple: in the B2B space, we’re not dealing with a single, quick sale of goods. We’re typically dealing with complex, expensive transactions that take time. It takes time for the buyer to decide to buy, and as a result the business needs to be very patient while the buyer takes their time, while remaining top of mind for the buyer. Not an easy task!

This also reflects on the Marketing/Sales relationship, because the complexity of these sales requires a lot of cooperation between Marketing and Sales and a highly knowledgeable Sales rep when the time finally comes to make the sales pitch.

The complexity of these relationships in the B2B space means that automation is very important – without automation, efficiently managing these long buying cycles is nearly impossible. The beauty of Marketing Automation systems is that they enable not just lead nurturing over long periods of time, but also a much better relationship and understanding between Sales and Marketing.

Many companies still grapple with the issue of sales and marketing alignment, or misalignment. Traditionally, it’s been very difficult for marketing and sales organizations to align. Marketing often complain that sales doesn’t follow-up on leads, while sales say that they do follow up, but those leads are no good – they are not sales-ready. So while marketing often assumes that sales needs more leads, sales reps actually don’t need “more leads” – they need “better leads.”

When marketing and sales don’t work together to identify leads, to define what is a sales-ready lead and to follow up with those leads with an agreed-upon sales-ready messaging, the result is a sales-marketing disconnect, which greatly reduces sales effectiveness and hurts organizations’ bottom line by reducing sales.

Sales and marketing misalignment hurts organizations because it means that the marketing organization generates leads that the sales force can’t use, and marketing messages that don’t sell. Sales people, on the other hand, approach leads with generic messages, or with their own messages that are disconnected from the company’s message as defined by marketing.

One of the best ways to increase sales effectiveness is to align sales and marketing by having both organizations involved in determining and identifying lead readiness so that sales can focus on sales-ready prospects, and contact those prospects with effective, sales-ready messaging.

The right marketing automation tool can make a big difference in sales and marketing alignment. Marketing automation solutions provide sales with better leads because they provide tools such as lead scoring and lead nurturing, which enable sales to focus on sales-ready prospects while the marketing organization keeps in touch with leads that are not yet sales-ready.

Marketing automation solutions also encourage sales and marketing to work together, defining the criteria for lead scoring, and creating sales messaging that comes from sales but is in line with marketing’s general messaging.