The Key to a Greater ROI: Sales & Marketing Alignment
Do you have a deep understanding of your customer journey and how they are buying? Do you know what is essential to driving sales and increasing revenue? Most importantly, are you successfully tracking and analyzing your company’s ROI? If you answered “no” to any of these questions, here are a few tips to help you understand what you’re doing wrong and how to fix it.
Marketing Insider Group states that according to a B2B Content Marketing Report published by the Technology Marketing Community, “Only 8 percent consider themselves very or extremely successful at tracking ROI” and “24% consider themselves not successful at all.”
So why is it that so few marketers are successful at tracking ROI? When creating marketing campaigns, it is important that they result in leads or MQLs, which then leads to sales. That’s the whole point. With so many tools available to measure this, there is often something still missing, lowering the possibility of revenue growth.
Using the power of data and measuring output is important. In addition to that, though, sales and marketing alignment leads to greater success. According to their CMO’s Agenda report, Aberdeen Group found that successful sales and marketing alignment, you can:
- Generate 32% higher revenue
- Retain 36% more customers
- Achieve 38% higher win rates
By working together, businesses gain an understanding of their customer’s buying process and can then follow along with them at every point in the process.
SuperOffice lays out 8 great first steps to sales and marketing alignment. These include:
1. Create a single customer journey. There shouldn’t be different experiences for your prospects. Instead, you should create one single brand customer experience.
2. Agree on a customer persona. When the ideal customer is not clear, it can often lead to ineffective strategies and a disconnect between your teams.
3. Use a “marketing first” approach. This means that marketers target potential customers who have a specific problem and show them how it can be solved. When the lead is fully informed, the sales team can step in to reinforce what the marketing team has said and close the deal.
4. Track joint KPIs. By doing this, your team is uniting under one common goal.
5. Use customer feedback. Feedback can be helpful to pick out specific phrases to create new marketing messages, as well as refine your product or service offering.
6. Keep marketing messages consistent. One of the biggest benefits of an aligned sales and marketing team is consistent messaging. When the marketing team and the sales team refer to the same things as different things, it can lead to an inconsistent journey for your potential customer and give a bad impression of your business.
7. Create marketing assets to close the sale. When used by both sales and marketing teams, content marketing is highly effective at nurturing prospects through the different stages of the sales funnel.
8. Join forces on post-sale growth and retention. By only focusing on leads, you could be missing on profits you should be making from existing customers.
When sales and marketing are both working toward the same goals, activities will align to the customer buying journey, which will result in revenue outcomes, not just lead generation. This is because you’re able to put together a stronger marketing approach that will result in closed deals and long-lasting, valuable relationships. By using the method of sales and marketing alignment, you too can take part in higher ROI.
At RenderTribe, we focus on helping marketing align to sales outcomes with hyper-targeted content and ABM outreach. We believe this is one of the most important ways to increase ROI because it focuses on understanding what is working and calibrating all marketing activities.
RenderTribe is a B2B digital marketing agency helping SaaS companies. Contact us to see how we can help you discover & implement an account-based strategy that scales.
