There’s been much talk about, aligning sales and marketing for a long while. It looks like the relationship between these two groups continues to be a hot topic for sales lead managers. Why haven’t we been able to figure this one out and successfully implement a plan to improve alignment?
5 top friction points to check between your sales teams and marketing teams:
- Sales believes marketing is not delivering qualified leads and marketing believes sales is not following up on the qualified leads they are providing to sales.
- Sales and marketing are not collaborating toward the same goal.
- Fingers point instead of interlocking to collaborating toward a common goal.
- A higher authority has not put a stake in the ground that everyone has the same defined goal.
- Constructive conversation between sales and marketing doesn’t happen on a consistent basis.
Do alignment issues plague your outbound prospecting efforts? If you’ve resolved them – great, you’ve achieved a lot. The next 5 steps can help you check if your alignment is working as well as you think it is — or to help you get the groups in your business working together better.
5 basic steps to align your teams behind your prospecting effort:
- Define and refine a lead definition that your sales team and your marketing team agree on and adhere to.
- Sales and marketing should agree on the target market they are looking to engage with.
- Sales and marketing should work together and with customers to gain insight, and develop customer success documents to use during lead qualification.
- Develop and adhere to lead qualification questions.
- Ensure sales and marketing agree on lists and their content.
These 5 steps will help you deliver higher quality sales leads.
This is the second in a series that’s a quick refresher course – a total of 20 tips that can make outbound prospecting a more positive experience, and maybe even a challenge you enjoy taking on.