Aligning marketing and sales to achieve common revenue goals

The success of your business heavily depends on the coordinated operations of your marketing and sales teams. However, many organizations’ communication between these departments gets inhibited as both marketing and sales constantly compete with each other in order to prove which team is more valuable for the company. The reality is that both of these units are equally significant for company’s success. Marketing is responsible for generating as many high-quality leads as possible. Once qualified, it is sales department’s responsibility to turn these prospects into buying customers. However, research shows that the sales team ignores 50% of marketing leads and 79% of approved leads never turn into sales. So, why does sales fail to hit their quota even though marketing is reaching their lead generation goals?

One reason behind the inconsistency in communication is that oftentimes marketers and salespeople do not have the same understanding of what a qualified lead is. For example, let’s say your sales representatives are working with a specific business size and industry segment. The salespeople will not be able to meet their quota, if the majority of marketing produced leads will not match the requirements of leads your reps can work with. In other words, marketing metrics have not been well aligned with sales and revenue goals, which may result in a disproportionate number of target contacts your sales professionals can work with.

Marketing and sales teams need to work cooperatively, instead of simply focusing on their isolated goals. They have to pursue common business objectives and shared company goals. For this purpose, marketing metrics must be well-aligned with sales quotas, and sales teams should make their sales pipelines transparent as well as continuously analyze leads and provide feedback to marketing. Yet, aligning marketing and sales is easier said than done. Synergizing marketing and sales is a complex organizational process which requires time and effort. At the same time, businesses can take advantage of modern technology solutions, which will enable the sharing of data across departments, automate core business processes and streamline collaboration. That is why we have dedicated an entire eBook on the actionable steps you can take to align marketing and sales to get the most out of their pipeline and how leveraging intelligent CRM tools can actually further boost customer acquisition. Take a look!

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