Heard roughly 200 times at our prospects’ offices:
– Where are we with last month’s inbound leads?
– er….
– You know, the leads from the webinar, from the white paper downloads…?
– They’re pretty hard to reach and honestly the companies are too small, or in sectors I don’t find very interesting!
– Well yes, but if we hand you leads, you could at least start by working them!
– blablablablablablablabla
Why is it so urgent to reconcile Marketing and Sales? Two groups with different approaches and different tools, but ultimately a shared goal, right?
The answer is immediate and clear-cut: because this is how you will increase your conversion rate and avoid the office punch-ups 😉
Marketing is the set of actions a company puts in place to help sell its products, isn’t it?
If so, common sense would suggest that a good marketing manager should first and foremost be a good salesperson (what do you mean, a five-legged sheep?), or at the very least that the actions run by a marketing department should be 100% at the service of sales effectiveness.
So why do so many salespeople spend part of their time complaining about the quality of the leads they are handed, or about the fact that the events organised by Marketing are not always consistent with their core target?
It is true that every company works a little differently.
Some give their salespeople plenty of freedom, both in hunting and in monitoring. At the same time, many companies work on the principle that it is important to feed salespeople with leads generated by operational marketing activities (e.g. lead gen, inbound, SEO).
But do these activities reach the right target and convey the right message, the right positioning and the right arguments to attract leads that the sales team sees as credible?
Everyone agrees that there should be more dialogue between the two sides, leading to more knowledge sharing. What we observe at many of our prospects is that the realisation is there and the desire is there, but the lack of solutions or tools is very real.
The new sales intelligence tools now available to teams are sure to change the game.
At Mixdata, we have designed a Sales Acceleration tool, with features intended precisely to reconcile these two feuding siblings and make dialogue easier.
How?
1. By making salespeople more autonomous: they get a tool suited to their reality, to their need for exhaustiveness, for fast searching of new prospects, and also for knowledge about named accounts.
They can streamline their prospecting tasks while using their hunter’s instincts to build hyper-qualified, personalised lists and identify their priority accounts faster.
The idea is to free up their time for their other high-value tasks: needs analysis, advice, negotiation, selling, customer relationships and loyalty building.
2. By offering a shared prospecting and marketing tool for shared targeting strategies.
With sales intelligence tools, it becomes possible to involve the Sales teams in defining the targeting criteria, taking their ideas and field experience into account; new targeting criteria and new business signals are accessible and categorised, providing plenty of leads to exploit in order to reach the right target. At last everyone can agree on better-defined, shared targeting criteria, to be used for marketing campaigns and/or for building priority account lists (account based marketing).
As a result, Marketing will run less mass-market but more targeted campaigns, in line with what the salespeople ask for, and the salespeople will take part in defining the priority targets Marketing engages. Thanks to the export features, Marketing can then extract its files and run its activities through its traditional marketing automation, retargeting and other tools.
The ultimate goal is always that shared grail: increasing the conversion rate!!
3. By improving the regular enrichment of the CRM, so dear to Marketing: salespeople can now get into the habit of feeding the CRM themselves, quickly and without errors in the emails or phone numbers at the point of entry.
Data acquisition is a constant concern for Marketing, always very demanding in terms of qualification, mandatory fields, format and duplicate removal.
The connectors Mixdata has set up with the main CRMs (Salesforce, MS Dynamics, etc.) and marketing automation tools on the market (Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, etc.) meet this integration need. With a single click they enable the enrichment and automatic update of sales data.
4. By increasing customer knowledge: on its company records, Mixdata aggregates all the strategic and contact data salespeople need to track and better retain their customers. Here again this is a major challenge, common and shared.
Everything suggests that if dialogue and initiatives develop, each side will naturally take on more responsibility:
– leads should be worked on time and more proactively
– marketing campaigns should become more effective
– salespeople should “close” faster
Habits are not easy to shake, we know that well, but working in silos brings nothing good.
Marketing must serve Sales, which in turn must inspire Marketing and act on the initiatives that go in the right direction… a lovely virtuous circle that contributes to the company’s overall effectiveness!
For more information about Mixdata and its Sales Acceleration solution, it’s this way:
