Sales team complaining about low quality leads, and marketing team unhappy about the lack of sales follow up? This is a familiar situation in many businesses.
To drive significant results from your marketing, it’s time to close the gap between your sales and marketing objectives, and bring their plans into alignment.
You need to build an integrated strategy reflecting the stages of the customer’s buying journey through the sales pipeline, taking into account the rates of conversion and time lag in decision making, and reflecting the contributions of both sales and marketing to generating revenues and gaining new customers.
Here’s how you can do it in 7 easy steps
Step 1: business objectives
Define the business objectives and direction which the sales and marketing strategies are supporting. Ensure clarity and understanding.
Step 2: target market
Broad customer segmentation completed, including demographic profiles, purchasing behaviour, needs and value.
Step 3: definition of solution
Define the solution offered to and desired by customer segments, and range of services that should be offered.
Step 4: strategic position
Against the key brand values and desired outcomes by customers (for example: price, speedy turnaround, high quality), define the position that the company should occupy within the marketplace. Perform a Competitor Overview, comparing relative key strengths and weaknesses to identify opportunities.
This review will lead to the definition of a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) relative to other companies, which can be emphasised in marketing and sales activity.
Step 5: identify marketing objectives and alignment with sales objectives
Based on the business objectives, customer segmentation/value and percentage of repeat business, we will model the number of new clients and customer retention rate required to achieve the revenue objectives.
Step 6: marketing strategy
Broad strategic framework will be outlined, including identification of key marketing channels, the objective behind their use, and integration between channels.
These channels could include:
online
direct mail
events
social media
SEM
advertising
sponsorship
surveys
Step 7: marketing plan and campaign development
A marketing plan will be developed, to align with sales activities and overall business objectives. A pipeline model will be used to determine the objectives for each step of the individual campaigns, with specific goals for both sales and marketing.