Demand Generation: How to align sales and marketing to maximise results

When you align sales and marketing processes to drive efficiency and accelerate revenue growth, Demand Generation is the result.

Sales and marketing have a common goal – to drive sales and revenue growth. This is why businesses should make it a priority to align sales and marketing activities.

Despite this, sales and marketing teams are not always working in synergy, missing out on the opportunity to coordinate activities and support each other to generate more commercial outcomes. This is commonly because marketing teams feel like their sales counterparts don’t make the most of the leads and content they generate, while sales teams often find marketing leads and content not supporting their sales funnel.

To successfully integrate sales and marketing to form a cohesive Demand Generation strategy, people, processes and technology need to work together towards a common goal.

Targeting the right people

To create an aligned sales and marketing strategy that delivers results, it’s important that both the sales and the marketing teams identify leads that are most likely to convert into opportunities. In other words, it’s crucial for both sides to ensure they’re selling and marketing to the same targeted audience. Determining sectors, location, company size, job titles and other criteria is therefore essential for defining your ideal customer.

Consistent processes

To align sales and marketing, your content marketing strategy should be approached as a joint effort across both departments. Since the majority of today’s B2B buyers conduct research on their own, content needs to inform, educate and be of high quality. The content should also be easily accessible, be available throughout the different stages of the sales cycle and provide uniform and correct information.

By the time a prospect speaks with a sales professional, it’s likely the prospect will have already acquired some information on the company, its products and/or services. The messaging therefore needs to be consistent at each stage of the sales pipeline to keep leads engaged and ensure they aren’t misinformed.

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, whether hosted internally or externally, 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.

Want to know more about aligning sales and marketing to create effective Demand Generation? Contact us or get our Demand Generation Services Rate Card by filling in the form below.