Posted by When it comes to running a business, there are many factors that you need to focus on. Especially to run it successfully and help it to grow.
For example, keeping track of contact history, maintaining strong relationships with your customers, understanding what to do to attract more customers, etc., but these factors aren’t the only things that you must focus on when running a business.
Sales and marketing are considered to be important parts of a business. They help to provide your customers with what they need, bring profit to your company, and close deals.
However, if these 2 parts aren’t aligned with each other, then it’s impossible for you to gain any of these benefits. In fact, it would cause your business to suffer a major loss.
Here are 5 ways a B2B CRM strategy can help sales and marketing alignment:
1. Shared goals
If you want your company to generate more leads, then the staff should be on the same page. This means people from all different departments must share the same goals as you.
Sales and marketing may be completely different from each other. The people in these 2 departments may have different perspectives too.
But, by making these departments share the same goals, they’ll be able to show better results in their work.
By doing so, it will be much easier for everyone in the company to cooperate and work together. They’ll be able to come up with solutions and ideas collectively and avoid any conflicts because of disagreements.
2. Knowing and understanding your audience
Targeting your audience must be your top priority. You need to make an effort to understand what type of audience you’re targeting.
Without knowing that, you won’t be able to generate any leads in your business.
One way to do that is by creating an ideal customer profile. An ideal customer profile consists of different characteristics that are analyzed by the sales and marketing teams.
They are all then determined on whether they’re fit to be considered as leads or not.
This also allows your sales and marketing teams to work together.
Now, analyzing the characteristics of a lead and collectively coming to a decision is also easier.
Discuss with your loyal customers why they found your products and content helpful and useful to them, and recognize the characteristics of your customers that are pleased with your products and content. With the help of this data, you’ll be able to create an ideal customer profile easily.
3. Improve communication
There are times when the sales team blames the marketing team for poor leads.
And on the other hand, the marketing team blames the sales team for not going through them properly. However, both are in the wrong due to the lack of communication between them. When two parties have to work together, communication is crucial.
To ensure the alignment of the sales and marketing departments, you need to find some way to maintain a certain level of communication between these two departments. You can also arrange regular meetings between the sales and marketing teams called SMarketing meetings with the help of the best real estate CRM platform HubSpot.
By doing this, they’ll become more used to communicating with each other.
And then, present more effective results by working together, creating a more organized work atmosphere.
4. Create a service agreement
Another important step to take to help sales and marketing align is by creating an agreement called the marketing level service agreement. This is an agreement that states the responsibilities of both the sales and marketing teams and helps to avoid any conflicts that may arise over who is doing their job and who isn’t.
During the process of creating a marketing level service agreement, you will have 2 representatives from both the sales and marketing teams who will agree to whatever the agreement expects from them.
You can also arrange regular meetings between the sales and marketing teams called SMarketing meetings to ensure that they’re aligned with one another. By doing this, they’ll become more used to communicating with each other and present more effective results by working together, creating a more organized work atmosphere.
Here are some things that are included in a marketing level service agreement:
Summary of agreement
A brief description of the measures of success and the duties of each team member from both parties.
Goals of both parties
When you create an SLA (service level agreement) between a sales and marketing team, it’s important to include the goals that you appoint to both of them.
What’s needed by both parties
Analyze what is needed by both the sales and marketing departments. For example, communication is needed by both of them. So, arrange weekly meetings that allow both the departments to communicate with each other.
What to determine for both parties?
Every team member of both departments will have their responsibilities and roles to play, such as who will make sure that all of the conditions are being followed, etc.
5. Measuring success
In this final step, everything is analyzed to see which areas in the departments are showing good progress and which areas are showing weak progress.
By doing this, they’ll be able to add improvement to the areas in the departments that are showing weak progress. In the sales department, you only need to keep track of the number of deals closed by the sales team, which makes the entire process easy. Although the same can’t be said for the marketing department.
However, with the help of marketing velocity, you can easily calculate the efficiency of the marketing team based on the hours of work they put in. This way, you’ll be able to tell what tasks your marketing department should be spending their sources on.
Takeaway
Due to the misalignment of the sales and marketing department, many companies end up suffering from major losses. However, with the help of these 5 ways, you can align your sales and marketing department using a B2B CRM strategy.