Sales-driven marketing is an effective and powerful tool that can help you attract and retain buyers. Retaining loyal customers is just as important for B2B brands as it is for B2C brands, if not more so. However, with Account-Based Marketing (ABM), you are focusing on a smaller target audience. The accounts are of higher value, but there are still fewer of them than when a brand targets general audiences, so it’s even more important to convert and retain the ones you are focusing on.
This is why sales and marketing teams must work together when you are utilizing an ABM strategy. Though traditional marketing might say that being sales-driven will alienate your consumers by dismissing their individual needs, with ABM, you need collaboration between sales and marketing because closing B2B deals is so important.
Aligning Sales and Marketing to Drive Conversions and Revenue
If your sales and marketing team isn't aligned, then trying to convert leads becomes like shooting in the dark. This is because even if your marketing team is generating leads, sales won’t be able to capitalize. After all, both teams have separate priorities.
If sales and marketing teams work together to nurture leads, the outcome is more profitable. A recent study showed that businesses are 67% more efficient at closing deals when their marketing and sales are aligned.
Instead of seeing the other as the competition, sales and marketing should work together to support one another, and one way to do this is to focus on a sales-driven marketing strategy. If sales-driven marketing is more profitable for the company, then everyone benefits — both sales and marketing.
How to Create a Sales-Driven Marketing Strategy
Six key components are essential when you want to create a sales-driven marketing strategy:
1. Organizing Your Sales Around the Buyer Personas
The buyer personas that you create for tailoring your marketing messaging can also be useful to the sales team. Sales reps can use buyer personas to better understand who they are selling to, which can help them personalize their sales tactics to the ones making the buying decisions. This will help the marketing team as it enables the sales team to establish a better relationship with the buyers, which means the buyer will then be more receptive to marketing efforts.
2. Lead Alignment and Sharing
Both sales and marketing have the same goal of generating and converting leads, but if the teams aren’t sharing and nurturing these leads together, then the buyer can get mixed signals depending on who they are engaging with. It’s important to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are in alignment when generating and converting leads.
3. Cross-Team Training
One of the challenges of having a sales-driven marketing strategy is that sales and marketing teams often don’t fully understand what the other is doing. Sales teams don’t know how marketing teams work and vice versa. To get everyone on the same page, it’s helpful to do cross-team training. For example, you can have your marketing sit in on sales calls so they can understand how that process works. Alternatively, you can have your sales team stand in on marketing demos to know how the marketing teams work their magic.
4. Coordinated Content
One of the key elements when creating sales-driven marketing is ensuring it’s coordinated with the sales team. This isn’t to say that the sales team should decide what content gets made, but it’s important to loop them in and get their opinion. This will ensure that everyone is on the same page and is aware of the messaging that is being delivered to the buyer.
5. Setting Shared Goals
Traditionally, sales and marketing teams operate based on different goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, sales might only focus on the revenue being generated, while marketing might pay closer attention to traffic. While it’s perfectly fine to have separate KPIs to work from, it’s important to have some shared goals as well, such as lead value and conversion rate. That way, both teams are measuring and influencing with similar goals in mind, which can help increase conversion rates.
6. Sharing Reporting and Analysis
Just as you would use data and analytics to track and measure performance to inform marketing decisions, you should use that same data to inform your sales team. If everyone is working from shared data and insights, then it helps the sales and marketing be more in alignment. This is essential if you want to create an effective sales-driven marketing strategy. Both teams should be sharing their learning so everyone is on the same page and working toward similar goals.
Increase Conversions With Sales-Driven Marketing
Understanding how to get marketing and sales teams to work together to create a sales-driven marketing strategy is not easy. In many cases, these teams often see each other as competition, or at minimum, they don’t pay attention to what the other is doing.
Discover the effectiveness of your sales and marketing strategy by taking the Cogo & Co. Growth Readiness Test to receive your personalized score. Schedule a free consultation to delve into a detailed analysis of your sales funnel, enhance conversion rates at each stage, and propel your business towards accelerated growth.
