How to use Marketing Automation to break down the wall between marketing and sales? (part 3)
In our first two articles “Digitalization of the marketing and sales landscape” and “why should marketing and sales work together?” we spoke about factors that cause misalignment between marketing and sales. Baseline is that marketing generates and nurtures leads and passes these to the sales department, that prioritize leads and thereby increase revenue, profitability and/or market share. To manage this marketing automation is required.
The entire implementation begins by creating a common ground and use of common definitions. Marketers need to communicate with potential buyers at every stage of their problem-solving cycle, providing them with information that is targeted to their needs, role, intent and interest level. Thereby they need to communicate and coordinate their activities with sales as well. When marketing automation is used as an accelerator for aligning marketing and sales, there are 5 levels to complete. Below you can find a description of each level.
Level 1 – Define your maturity together
How simple this might seem, in many companies sales has no clue how marketing works and vice versa. In order to set-up a streamlined marketing automation certain capabilities have to be in place. The maturity of marketing automation totally depends on the maturity of sales and marketing capabilities. The first step in using Marketing Automation as an enabler is knowing where marketing and sales stand and where you want to go.
Make sure marketing and sales are sitting at the same table to define the maturity of each capability. Align this outcome and define to which level of maturity of marketing automation you are aiming for. Marketing Automation can only accelerate if capabilities like lead management, data management, nurturing and lead qualification are developed to a certain maturity. Lead management automation (LMA) requires a degree of process maturity many B2B firms normally do not possess, resulting in underachievement by vendors and users alike (1).
Level 2 – Lead management automation (LMA)
Before setting up Marketing Automation you have to know when and how you are going to handover leads nurtured by marketing to sales. If you do not have this process installed at the start of the campaign, leads generated from marketing campaigns might not be followed up by sales and all efforts will be a waste of time and money.
Decisions that need to be made by marketing and sales together are: defining what attributes and behaviors indicate a lead being worthy of worked at by sales, how quickly sales will follow up their own leads, and how they will record the feedback.
The stages of the sales funnel
Sales and marketing must agree on the stages of the funnel, what defines each stage and they should also use the same terminology across the entire funnel. This is a challenge, but critical if you want to set-up marketing automation successful. There is no one agreed definition for each organization, the sales funnel depends on your market, product, sales process and of course your customers. What is important here, is that marketing and sales agree on the terminology used for each sales stage.
Status type of a lead in each stage
The status type describes the present state of the lead in that stage. A lead can for example be new to the business, reengaged or inactive. Together define what types exist in your organization.
Expiration of stage
A sales funnel should be a flow of leads. This means if a lead stays in one stage for a certain time, the funnel should go back to the first stage. This expiration time of each stage has to be defined.
Owner & activities
Define the owner of the lead. Who is responsible for moving the lead upwards trough the sales funnel? For each stage it should be clear who the owner is and what activities belong to this responsibility.
KPI’s
How do you measure the success of each stage? How many leads are proceeding to the next funnel. To measure the success of a stage you have to define KPIs together. In the first funnel this could be digital engagement of the lead.
Level 3 – Lead nurturing
Align marketing and sales teams around the buyer. The customer is the focal point of marketing and sales efforts. Together create customer journeys to get to know the needs of your customers. What are the information needs for your customer during each stage in the buyers journey? Connect these information needs with nurturing programs. Also agree on the role each team will play in delivering the information required at each stage to help the customer move confidently to the next step.
Level 4 – Lead qualification
Set up an approach of scoring leads based on profile AND digital behavior. Define together with sales what type of profile the lead should be, this is called implicit scoring and define what activities of a lead are signs of an engaged and potential customer (explicit scoring). A profile and activities are combined in a lead score, which tells both marketing and sales were a lead is in the sales funnel.
Aberdeen Research showed us that scoring based on both behavior and profile greatly increases the success of marketing automation. Lead scoring works only if accepted by sales, so design lead scoring together with marketing and sales.
Level 5 – Full integration
At the final stage of integration between marketing and sales, it is of utmost importance to continuously communicate with each other to see where improvements can be made.
In the ideal situation marketing and sales have access to the same information on a dashboard. On this dashboard real time status of the different sales funnel stages are visible.
Conclusions and lessons learned
After completing the five levels described, marketing and sales should be more aligned than ever. KPI’s should be in line with the shared long and short-term goals. Most important is that sales is now better able to use the leads coming from marketing. However, the implementation of an intelligent marketing automation tool does not automatically lead to cooperation, but it can be a great enabler.
In order to enable this cooperation a few quick lessons should be taken into account.
- Involve sales as early as possible! What we often experience, is that marketing sets up a lead scoring model. The risk of doing this is that sales is not satisfied (or not taken into account) with the quality of leads, which results in lack of trust between sales and marketing. So when setting up Marketing Automation involve sales as early as possible to ensure the quality and acceptance of leads.
- Marketing Automation cannot be implemented as independently or stand alone. Make sure you adapt marketing automation to your current processes. Think of content management, governance and legal procedures. Otherwise you will not fully profit of the campaign effectiveness marketing automation can bring you.
- Do not want too much! Marketing Automation can seem complicated if you have to implement it throughout the entire organization. Our advice is to start small. Begin with a small pilot campaign or a specific division. Once that is set up, you can show marketing AND sales the benefits and extent the use of marketing automation within the organization.
- Communication and mobilization is key when implementing Marketing Automation. Organize workshops, create inspirational videos and educate your stakeholders on the benefits of Marketing Automation.
- Show sales the value of Marketing Automation with a business case. Calculate the extra revenue you can create when using Marketing Automation. This will help to mobilize the organization.
Furthermore for the integration of sales and marketing it is of utmost importance to continuously talk with each other to see where improvements can be made. Because Intelligent Marketing Automation (IMA) is a new field, trial and error is for now the way to go.
Source
(1) Forrester (2009) – B2B Lead Management Automation Market
Laaste 5 artikelen van Marie-Christien van Wensen
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