Are your sales and marketing teams looking at the same metrics for evaluating revenue growth? Are they aligned, and do they have a common goal?
We often see sales teams complain about the quality of leads, and marketing teams complain about sales not being able to close leads. These gaps result in unproductive prospecting, loss of potential leads, and a strain on the marketing budget.
According to MarketingProfs, “organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions experience 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates.”
Marketing automation is a tool that can help align sales and marketing teams. Here is how.
1. Lead Scoring
It is important to identify early in the process what a qualified lead is and what criteria are to be used to quality the leads. Marketing can then focus on nurturing and qualifying leads that show promise, based on the agreed and defined criteria.
Lead scoring is a key feature that a marketing automation tool brings to the table. Contacts and leads are scored based upon many factors, including their actions, behaviors, engagement level over time, profile, demographics and more. Actions and behaviors are primary indicators of interest, and the tool assigns scores that accrue as the contact progresses through the buyer’s journey. When the lead score hits an established threshold, the lead converts into a qualified lead that can be passed to sales.
The higher the lead score, the more likely is it to be converted into a potential buyer. Companies that use lead scoring regularly see a 77% higher lead generation RoI than their counterparts. Lead scoring, therefore, compresses the sales cycle and improves conversion rates, making both marketing and sales more confident about the efficacy of how their contacts progress through the buyers’ journeys.
2. Dynamic Content Across Buyer Personas
A big challenge faced by marketing is to deliver optimized and relevant content to prospects based on their buyer persona. Dynamic content delivers tailored messages to the targeted audience. It allows a marketer to swap out areas of content (e.g. subject line, headline, image, body copy) based on the recipient/viewer — all without writing code.
Making personalization the key priority in strategic content planning allows marketing teams to deliver unique, engaging experiences to targeted contacts.
3. Campaign Tracking
Marketing teams must continuously monitor RoI on new campaigns. Marketing automation enables tracking website visitors’ conversions from their very first visit to their first purchase. Marketers can even develop in-depth insights using emails, webinars, and social events, allowing them to effortlessly personalize inbound marketing and meeting customers where they are in the buying journey.
With analytical tools, the process of identifying gaps in a buyer’s journey becomes simpler, measurable, and actionable, beginning with the contact’s first visit and guiding them all the way into a sales-qualified lead. Accordingly, the buyer’s journey can be monitored, evaluated, and even re-designed to deliver the expected results.
Marketing automation expertise brings much that improves the B2B sales cycle. KAIROS Pulse, a B2B marketing agency, can help create and execute a sales and marketing automation strategy tailored to your needs. We will drive more leads, convert more opportunities, and optimize the entire customer journey with our all-in-one sales and marketing automation tool.
For a free demo that shows how we can align, accelerate, and scale your marketing and sales teams, book a meeting with us today.
