While there are many advantages to this alignment, there are just as many obstacles facing teams trying to get on the same page. Read on to break down the top five challenges marketing and sales teams face as they try to align, as well as some solutions to make team alignment a reality.
Marketing to sales handoff seems simple enough
When a lead is qualified to be passed on to sales (a sales qualified lead or SQL), it’s the marketing team’s job to make sure their sales colleagues know about it.
To generalize, there are two areas where this transfer can go wrong.
The first is qualification criteria, or the agreement on when the time is right to hand the lead off to sales. Think about it: What are your marketing qualified lead (MQL) and SQL criteria? What are you using to ensure these criteria are met for daily handoffs? How nuanced are the qualifications?
If your sales and marketing teams can have different answers to these questions, the result can be a handoff nightmare.
The second problem area involves
The mechanism for handoffs. Are your marketing leads automatically rotated once they’re qualified, or do they already have an owner before they reach that stage? Do you assign a task to your sales rep, send them a notification, email them, notify them on Slack, or some chile telemarketing list combination of these options?
Tools like Marketing Hub and Sales Hub are great for facilitating this process. But the process only works to the extent that it has been defined . The handoff from marketing to sales . Needs to be thought out and agreed upon by both teams for it to be successful . A task made much more difficult if the teams don’t operate on the same systems.
The solution to difficult marketing to sales transfers
To address a less-than-seamless handoff from marketing to sales. You’ll need to coordinate with your marketing operations. And sales operations teams to agree on the full lifecycle stage parameters.
Ask your teams how the following criteria impact the handoff from marketing to sales: lifecycle stage, role, lead scoring, purchasing greater alignment between marketing and sales committee composition, and ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) level. Handoffs can change from team to team, ICP level to ICP level, and product to product.
Next, view reports to see at what stage of the contact lifecycle sales engaged. On the opportunities that were won to objectively determine what has been most successful to date.
Finally, once everyone agrees on the terms of their lifecycle germany phone number stages and when and. How sales should be leveraged to reach out directly, use your CRM . Marketing automation platform . And other technology to align with these newly agreed-upon handoff guidelines.
Disparate systems
There are literally hundreds of tools that your sales and marketing teams could use to run their individual operations.
The result? A restaurant menu-sized list of tech tools for your marketing operations team to get their act together.
For marketing and sales activities, especially those that require a handoff, data accuracy is everything . And the more tools you have, the less likely your data is to be reliable.