Mastering the Alignment of Sales and Marketing

make sure that sales is not getting involved just because you've qualified prospects and found them to be at the level that sales should now get involved. Hand them off at the appropriate time.

5. Make them into opportunities, or sales-qualified leads. At this point, sales continues the discussion, with marketing at the ready to help with information.

6. Keep them engaged (again and still). Marketing stays involved in providing the sales teams or individual salesperson with the intelligence needed to improve the chances of the opportunity closing successfully.

7. Close the deal. Does this need any explanation?

The overall process is often called lead to cash; technology provider CallidusCloud calls it lead to money. But what it reflects is a joint effort with common objectives at all points between sales and marketing without subsuming either one to the other.

To get to that alignment takes a lot of work. Both departments need to regularly meet and continually communicate. Both need to understand what the other is doing and need what could amount to as much as 10 days of training about the other one.

There are numbers to support the value of performing this realignment. Marketo and Math Marketing did a joint study in 2013 and found that with about 10 days of training marketing teams to create highly qualified leads, sales teams to both accept marketing's qualified leads and act quickly on them, and both to discover the joys of generating new business, 29 percent more new business was generated from sales and 26 percent more was generated from marketing.

This training and communication tended to be done by two-thirds of the best-in-class companies of this kind and only 27 percent of the companies deemed laggards, according to Aberdeen. Clearly, these are practices that have a great purpose and a measurable outcome.

When sales and marketing alignment was first posited, it was more about marketing accountability than anything else. Marketing professionals were not doing what CEOs felt they should, because they were seeing intangible results that took tangible things (i.e., money) to produce. Frankly, that was mostly due to blindness on the part of the CEOs, since potential customers had to be aware of the company and what it offered before anyone would buy from it. But the transformation of the customer landscape, due to the revolution in communications and the creation, distribution, and consumption of information, made the alignment of sales and marketing an urgent and measurable requirement for businesses. So it remains today. Get busy, talk to your sales and marketing people, and start making this essential partnership work for you.

---

Paul Greenberg (@greenbe on Twitter) is president of consultancy The 56 Group (the56group.typepad.com) and cofounder of training company BPT Partners. He is also the conference chair of CRM Evolution (www.crmevolution.com). The fourth edition of his book, CRM at the Speed of Light, is available in bookstores and online.

---

Related Articles

Docurated Offers Its Content Cloud Through the Salesforce App Exhchange

The platform creates closer working relationships between sales and marketing.

Why Sales and Marketing Need a Unified Dashboard

When business teams align, everyone wins.

Build a Better Marketing Funnel

Go from failure-centric to customer-centric.

Align Sales and Marketing with CRM Insight

Gain a complete view of the sales funnel to achieve a common goal.

TouchCommerce Launches TouchStore to Enhance Omnichannel Retailing Experience

TouchStore addresses mobile in-store usage with technology and solution to increase conversion and consumer engagement for the retail omnichannel environment.

SugarCRM and Marketo Partner

CRM, marketing automation integration aligns demand generation with key sales activities

Improving Marketing and Sales Alignment

Don't let a shift in power catch you unprepared.