It can be costly if you don't work together! What are they actually doing in the marketing department and are we going to get any quality leads we can use? Why don't they do something in the sales department and follow up properly on all the good leads we generate for them? Do you recognize any of these prejudices in your company?
Knowledge and understanding of each other’s work sometimes lies in a very small place. And this small space can be incredibly costly for the company if sales and marketing don’t find the melody and work towards the same goals. Several studies have shown that the lack of collaboration between sales and marketing is one of the critical success factors for continued growth for many companies today. So it’s time to throw the “silos” in the trash, join forces and create a common language. In other words, to start working better together as one strong unit towards common goals. Developing a common Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a great tool to move forward with.
The not-so-literal word “smarketing” is starting to appear more and more in connection with closer collaboration between the two departments – it’s a contraction of the two words. It’s all about your customers and making sure they have the best experience when they buy from you. This is best achieved if they experience a company that works well together in all phases of the user journey. At the same time, studies have shown that companies where the collaboration between sales and marketing is perceived as optimal achieve significantly better results than other more traditional companies:
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The study also found that good collaboration leads to higher brand awareness and higher sales per customer. But what is it that makes collaboration between sales and marketing go wrong in many companies?
One of the main culprits is a lack of communication between sales and marketing as user journeys become more complicated. You don’t really know what the other department is doing – and it’s not coordinated. A customer might receive a newsletter with a great deal on a product – right after sales has had a problem with the customer about the same product. Or marketing launches a campaign where the process for following up on leads has not been agreed with sales.
The market has also changed. Cold canvas and push advertising don’t have the same impact as before. The majority of the process takes place online:
     Source: Content Marketing Institute
This means that marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of the sales process. Potential buyers need to be attracted online using digital marketing efforts and they need to help nurture to turn a marketing qualified lead into a sales qualified lead ready to buy.
A website visitor who has submitted their contact information through a form or on a chat.
Leads that have shown an interest in our company/products and that also fit your customer profile and buyer persona.
A lead that has shown interest in buying your products and that the sales team has deemed worth pursuing. A salesperson has initiated a dialog and they will most likely end up becoming a customer.
Combining sales and marketing under a common manager is not necessarily the right solution for a company. Forcing marketing to adopt a more aggressive approach might also not be a good solution. It is more about recognizing that sales and marketing bring different strengths to the process and figuring out how to best leverage these strengths in a coordinated and effective joint effort. It can be beneficial to formalize this in an agreement across the disciplines.
A good place to start is to agree on who your ideal customers are. In other words, it allows you to understand your potential customers (buyer personas) even better and makes it easier to target relevant content to the specific needs and behaviors that help motivate your customers in the buying decision. The development of buyer personas should be based on as much input as possible – both from your own company departments and data collection. It’s important to understand how your products are used by your buyer personas (read more about buyer personas here and how to develop them).
When buyer personas are identified, they don’t immediately indicate where the personas are in the user journey. Are they also a good match for our services? Are they actually ready to buy? It might be that a potential customer is a good match, but they don’t necessarily need the service right now. Therefore, it is important to define when a lead is a good match for you and when they are ready to make a purchase.
If a lead is not ready to buy, they need to be nurtured until they are ready. This is done through email nurturing (link to blog post) where automatic flows push a lead forward until it becomes “warm.” At the same time, you can launch a retargeting campaign on social media to influence them further and bring them back to the website, thus pushing them further in the process. This is also where 1-to-1 communication with emails/phone calls/meetings can be advantageously used.
To better understand what a lead is for you, it is necessary to look at the different stages in a sale—from unknown to becoming a customer.
It is necessary to discuss how each stage is perceived so that sales and marketing agree on when a contact moves from one stage to the next. It is also important to agree on when the sales team takes over from marketing and what is specifically expected of the departments at the different stages. Throughout this journey, it is crucial to obtain the right data on the contact, which is where marketing automation shows its great value. By providing an automatic score throughout the journey, we gain better insights into a lead, and we can see how good a match it is for us and how ready it is to buy. This is called lead scoring.
Lead scoring is used to rank a lead based on various parameters—both explicit and implicit. When a lead reaches a predetermined score, it indicates that the lead is ready to buy. Explicit factors are those that a lead provides directly in the form on your landing page, such as name, job title, role, interests, and challenges, etc. Depending on the lead’s answers, they are assigned a score representing a value. If you sell SaaS products, a lead with the role of “IT Manager” will likely be more valuable than a “service assistant.” Implicit scores are derived from the lead’s behavior on the website. Individual pages on the website are assigned a score based on their content. If a page has content that is interesting to people close to a purchase decision and thus at the end of the user journey, this page will have a higher lead score. This could be additional information such as product pricing.
Besides page visits, website behavior also includes actions taken on the site. An action can include downloads, watching a video, or requesting a demo. Again, the action is set up in relation to the persona’s user journey. Actions closely associated with a purchase decision typically have a higher lead score. The higher the lead score, the more ready the lead is to buy.
When sales and marketing have agreed on what a lead is and the different stages in the user journey for the various personas, it is time to set goals and KPIs for the joint effort. The goals are interconnected between the two departments. If marketing does not generate enough quality leads, sales will not be able to close enough orders at the other end. It will typically be individual for each company what is measured, but here are a few important metrics:
How many people visit the website, and how many of them (%) convert into leads (i.e., by filling out a form or engaging in a chat and providing data).
What percentage of your leads become marketing qualified?
What percentage of your leads become sales qualified?
The number of potential customers who become paying customers, i.e., the conversion rate.
Total revenue and average revenue per customer.
The time from the first contact to the first order.
A good way to tie all thoughts and goals together is to develop a so-called Service Level Agreement between the sales and marketing departments. An SLA formalizes the marketing and sales goals to ensure that the company is ready to achieve the common revenue targets. It increases commitment from both departments. Research shows that companies that have an SLA perform better than those that do not use them. It might be a good idea to ask another department (e.g., Finance or HR) for help in drafting it.
An SLA will typically include topics such as:
An example of a general SLA statement between sales and marketing.
Every month, Marketing will deliver at least 20 Sales Qualified Leads to Sales. , and Sales will ensure that these leads are contacted within 48 hours og receipt. Out of these, Sales is expected to secure 5 customers per month with an average revenue of DKK 40.000 each.Â
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