Part 2: The Impact Sales and Marketing Can Have When Working Together
In Part 1 of this series, I referenced a MarketingSherpa study that was, at best, discouraging to marketers. But in this post, I hope to bring you back from despair. There is a real trend happening in the B2B marketplace between Marketing and Sales and their shared resource – sales leads.
Here are three key stats from MarketingSherpa B2B Best Practices that show the impact Sales and Marketing can make when working together:
1. Companies that qualify leads, instead of sending them all to Sales, have a 30% higher return on lead generation investment.
- Wow – read that stat again: a 30% higher ROI. That’s a number marketers and the people that control our budget would love. Remember that number.
2. Companies that use lead scoring have a 60% higher return on lead generation investment.
- Doesn’t that just make sense? If you actually have a scoring system that is constantly being tweaked, you’ll better prepare the leads for the Sales team. The Sales team will start to value your teams’ efforts and sales will increase. Nirvana. Blend explicit fit, like industry and role, with implicit engagement, like visits and clicks. Define MQL and SQL thresholds, then tune scores using closed-won and closed-lost feedback. Sales gets fewer, better leads.
3. Companies that use marketing automation software, which points to a strategic lead generation approach, achieve a 96% higher return on lead generation investment.
- These are research figures and should scare you and make you happy about the future all at the same time. If the ROI can be this high, imagine how many sales dollars have been lost. How many marketing campaigns and systems that have gone under-utilized and then ultimately un-funded. Marketing automation supports behavior-triggered nurturing, segmentation, and email or web personalization. Connect it bi-directionally with your CRM for attribution and closed-loop reporting that syncs contacts, activities, stages, and revenue. That is how Sales trusts the numbers.
These are 3 key points on what can happen when Sales and Marketing really work together – when they implement a marketing and sales strategy that utilizes technology to help them in the process.
The shift in technology spending is continuing and will continue. By 2017, the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO. Why? To enable sales. To score leads. To nurture leads. To help manage the funnel – the complete funnel.
GDPR took effect in 2018 and CCPA in 2020. Both require consent or opt-out handling, clear notices, and data rights. Tie scoring and nurture to recorded consent and honor unsubscribe requests. Document processing purposes for audits.
So this all sounds good, but ‘it just won’t work in our company’. Ever hear that? It’s time to change the thinking inside your walls. Break down silos, create cross-function teams that help score the leads. And then when it just gets going, tweak it all again. Why? Because your competitors are getting better, faster and stronger and have created the perfect relationship between sales, marketing AND leads.
In Part 3 I’ll share some best practices based on hundreds of B2B case studies that will continue to excite you (and scare some of you).
