Sales & Marketing: B2B’s New Power Couple
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This document summarizes a presentation about improving alignment between sales and marketing teams. It discusses how today's buyers complete most of their journey online before contacting sales. It then outlines four common misalignments between sales and marketing: not having aligned goals, marketing content that is difficult for sales to find and use, disagreeing on what makes a qualified lead, and leads not being passed to sales quickly enough. For each misalignment, it provides strategies for improvement, such as establishing a single sales funnel, creating centralized content repositories, jointly defining lead qualifications, and setting strict response time standards. The presentation argues that better alignment can lead to more revenue through higher lead quality, pipeline growth, conversion rates and faster response times.
Sales & Marketing: B2B’s New Power Couple
- 1. Sales & Marketing: B2B’s Newest Power Couple #B2BSummit April 29-30, 2015 | AT&T Park, San Francisco, CA Adam Blitzer SVP & GM Pardot, Salesforce @adamblitzer
- 2. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 2 Why Does Sales & Marketing Alignment Feels Like This?
- 3. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 3 When It Could Feel Like This
- 4. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 4 Agenda The New Buyer’s Journey The Cost of Misalignment 4 Common Sales & Marketing Conversations Q&A
- 5. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 5 Buyers Are More Connected Than Ever Website Social Media Email References Community
- 6. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 6 Buyers Control the Sales Cycle ABOUT US CONSUMER REVIEWS SOCIAL MEDIA COMMUNITY DISCUSSIONS PRICING PAGE CONTACT SALES GOOGLE SEARCH By 2020, 85% of the buyer’s journey will be completed before the buyer reaches out to sales. 85%
- 7. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 7 Disconnected teams: Marketing and Sales silos Disconnected tools: Fragmented, hard to access and use Disconnected story: No holistic view of buyer makes insights elusive Most Companies Are Struggling to Adapt
- 8. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 8 68% of companies have not identified their sales funnel 79% of Marketing leads are never converted to Sales Only 46% of reps win more than half of potential deals 10% of revenue lost per year due to Sales and Marketing misalignment Limited Visibility Poor Lead Quality Not Enough Leads Low Lead Conversion Missed Revenue Target The Cost of Being Disconnected
- 9. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 9 “Only 30% of CMOs have a clear process or program to make sales and marketing alignment a priority.” -CMO Council
- 10. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 10 Marketing and sales conversation #1* *Real life sales and marketing leaders VP, Sales VP, Marketing “We missed our target – we need more air cover.” “We send you tons of leads. You just aren’t closing them.”
- 11. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 11 Strategy #1: (Re)align Goals
- 12. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 12 Todays KPIs are Usually Misaligned Sales Marketing
- 13. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 13 Funnels & Pipelines are Divided Visitor Inquiry MQL SQL Won A divided funnel leads to ✖ lead volume over lead quality ✖ turf wars over leads ✖ marketing being a cost center ✖ content that focuses on lead generation Sales Marketing
- 14. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 14 Get to a Single Funnel A single funnel leads to ✔ a single end goal ✔ one scorecard for the entire business ✔ content that moves prospects through buying stages ✔ a better hand off / hand back (recycling) process ✔ trust Visitor Inquiry MQL SQL Won Marketing&Sales
- 15. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 15 Pipeline and revenue: where the rubber meets the road for sales and marketing.
- 16. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 16 Marketing and sales conversation #2* *Real life sales and marketing leaders VP, Sales VP, Marketing “You don’t make the right content and we can’t ever find what we need.” “You never use it anyway!”
- 17. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 17 Strategy #2: Content That is Easy to Find & Use (for reps!)
- 18. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 18 Most Content Sits on the Shelf “70% of content created by B2B marketing teams is never used by sales reps” -SiriusDecisions That’s because content is hard to find (not where the reps live) stale stage-agnostic persona-agnostic all first party not available in the right formats
- 19. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 19 One Stop Shop Filter by Type Filter by Theme A Central Repository (that isn’t terrible)
- 20. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 20 Nurture Your Sales Team Drive internal “demand” Make it fun!
- 21. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 21 Nurture Your Sales Team Chrome Extension Signature Management
- 22. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 22 Content Review is a Team Sport Mix hard data with anecdotes from the trenches. Data Anecdotes
- 23. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 23 Marketing and sales conversation #3* *Real life sales and marketing leaders VP, Sales VP, Marketing “The leads you send us are terrible.” “You aren’t following up with them! .”
- 24. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 24 Strategy #3: Define a Marketing Qualified Lead
- 25. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 25 Most Buyer Profiles Are Created in a Vacuum
- 26. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 26 Both Sides Need to Agree on Definitions SALES What’s happening in the trenches MARKETING Market research & campaign data TRUTH DEFINE MQLs and SQLs together ESTABLISH an SLA between teams REVISIT Every quarter
- 27. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 27 Agree on Two Types of Scores per Persona Geography Industry Company size Title Tracked behavior Recency of activity Frequency of activity Lead source Interest Fit
- 28. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 28 Marketing and sales conversation #4* *Real life sales and marketing leaders VP, Sales VP, Marketing “You aren’t getting leads to us fast enough.” “You don’t follow up fast enough.”
- 29. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 29 Strategy #4: Go Faster
- 30. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 30 Speed Matters “35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first.” -InsideSales.com
- 31. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 31 Establish SLAs Once the definition of an MQL is agreed upon Establish aggressive SLAs for lead distribution (should be seconds to minutes) Enforce an equally stringent SLA for lead follow-up (should be minutes to tens of minutes) Track win rate and sales cycle by first follow-up time
- 32. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 32 Why don’t sales reps follow up? They don’t know that a lead came in They are away from their desks They are working more pressing, “hot” leads The leads are obvious bad fits (you solved this with your MQL definition didn’t you?)
- 33. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 33 Interrupt your reps, they won’t complain! Close rates go up when reps have recency & context Push alerts to your reps everywhere they work (email, CRM, desktop, and phone) Give full context into prospect behavioral history Show them when a prospect is active Start with a pilot when rolling out alerts Consider specialization (inbound lead qualification)
- 34. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 34 Companies that Align Grow Faster Better AlignmentQuality LeadsPipeline Growth High Conversion More Revenue Source: Math Marketing / Sirius Decisions / MarketingProfs 24% faster three-year revenue growth 25% increase in Sales qualified leads 67% improvement in close rates 60% Increase in follow- up within 24 hours
- 35. ©2014 Copyright Demandbase, Inc. Demandbase Confidential. 35 Thank You