Demand Generation: Harmonising Sales and Marketing for Go-to-Market Success
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Successful demand generation is built upon a robust go-to-market (GTM) strategy and clear alignment between your sales and marketing team. This is often much easier said than done.
But, when we have a common goal, why do our teams often miss out on opportunities to coordinate activities, support each other, and generate better commercial outcomes?
The answers are often based on the following frustrations:
- Marketing teams think their sales counterparts don’t make the most of the leads and content they generate
- Meanwhile, salespeople think marketing leads and content don’t support the sales funnel effectively
To successfully integrate sales and marketing to form a cohesive demand generation strategy, people, processes and technology must work together towards a common goal. In this case, a GTM strategy.
Target audience segmentation
Who are your sales and marketing teams targeting, exactly? It’s a question so often overlooked, but assumptions that you’re all on the same page about your audience can be costly.
By gathering shared data into sectors, location, company size, job titles and other criteria, you begin to build a more accurate picture of your reach and potential.
This information all forms part of your GTM strategy. It helps to identify the highest-value segments of your target audience, and shares all the information you need to address their needs and pain points.
In this blog we share more insight into understang your ICP (ideal customer profile) >
Consistent processes
Today’s B2B buyers conduct research on their own, so content needs to inform, educate and be of high-quality. It should also be easily accessible, and available to the reader at the correct point of the sales cycle, to avoid overwhelming them.
Your GTM strategy will focus on communication styles not only between personas, but channels as well. What a prospect expects to see on LinkedIn will differ from a blog, and an email should read very differently from a sales pitch – because they sit at different points of the funnel.
By clearly defining this in your GTM strategy, your sales and marketing teams can maintain brand image and build trust at every stage.
Focus on filling your pipeline
Lack of communication is one of the main roadblocks when it comes to sales and marketing alignment.
For both teams to be able to work in perfect synchronicity, having access to a shared platform such as HubSpot, or internal processes documentation is important – this is especially useful when it comes to managing customer data to ensure there are no GDPR breaches.
Other marketing automation and sales enablement tools should be implemented with the aim of streamlining the demand generation process. In other words, all tools and software used should contribute towards the MQL (marketing qualified lead) and/or SQL (sales qualified lead) process – ultimately filling your sales pipeline.
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