This is the third and final post in our three-part series focusing on the use of technology to create sales and marketing alignment.
In first post we discussed Creating a Customer Focused Strategy to Align Sales and Marketing. In part two of this series, we discussed the first three components in creating a technology focused strategy (Create Technology Integration, Develop a Lead Nurturing Plan and Execute a Lead Nurturing Plan).
Now it’s time to look at the final three recommended steps focused on fostering Marketing and Sales Alignment:
- Develop Lead Scoring Profiles
- Expose The Lead/Customer Activity
- Report, Analyze and Collaborate
#4 Develop Lead Scoring Profiles
When a lead is being nurtured, you will need a way to determine when Marketing should pass the lead to the Sales team for follow up. Using lead scoring will help you to manage this process. Lead scoring helps you to assign a value to the activity that the customer is engaging in. For example, on this chart, provided by Act-On software, this company assigned the following lead scoring values:
Once a lead reaches the 25 point level, marketing passes this lead to sales. They are no longer passing all leads to sales but rather they are qualifying the lead before passing it along. How do you know what values to assign? Well…not to sound like a broken record but remember that persona and customer journey mapping exercise? Assign point levels based on how your customers engage and set higher values to those activities that indicate that the lead is moving closer to the end of the sales cycle.
#5 Expose The Lead/Customer Activity
As marketing is working to qualify a lead, there are several marketing activities that will take place and actions done by the customer. With an integrated system, you can share this information with your sales team so they can see and understand how your leads and contacts are engaging with your marketing activities by exposing that information in CRM. The sales team can use this information to target their conversation to the customer because they have a better idea of what the customer is interested in. This will lead to customers making “informed” customer calls rather than “cold” calls.
#6 Report, Analyze & Collaborate
It’s important that both teams are made aware of successes and failures along the way. So create dashboards and reports in your Marketing Automation and CRM systems to communicate activities. Plan to meet often to analyze and strategize. Don’t make this a one-time exercise. This data will help both of your teams to make better decisions going forward.
Organizations that can clearly define a Customer Focused& Technology Focused Strategy within their organizations will be well on their way to creating a strong alignment between their Marketing and Sales groups as well successes in lead management, customer acquisition and customer retention.
Read the Complete Series around Aligning your Sales and Marketing Teams:
- Creating a Customer Focused Strategy
- Creating a Technology Focused Strategy (Part I)
Want more? Register to attend our monthly marketing webinar series.
The post Align Marketing and Sales by Creating a Technology Focused Strategy – Part II appeared first on Ledgeview Partners.