Why sales and marketing alignment is a must for faster business growth

A while back I wrote a blog about the importance for businesses to build trust in these uncertain times and the central role content plays in building those long-term relationships and ensuring businesses add value to customers and prospects through all stages of the buying cycle.

As inbound marketing techniques and the use of digital channels to reach audiences has become more widely adopted to draw qualified leads, the level of self-education among B2B buyers by the time they connect with sales is much higher.

With such a high emphasis on content, alignment on strategic content planning between marketing and sales should be a top priority for businesses who are looking for efficient business growth. So why are so many B2B businesses still suffering from sales and marketing misalignment?

The battle between sales and marketing

Shouldn’t sales teams trust marketing professionals to understand the right content needed to build relationships, and shouldn’t marketing teams trust sales to understand and communicate back the sort of content needed at the bottom of the funnel, when validation and provider selection take place?

Well in an ideal world, both teams would be doing just that and together supporting the customer journey from MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) to SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads). This should be done in an environment of constant testing, learning and innovation where customer satisfaction and delivering customer value are joint goals.

Sadly that’s rarely the case. I’ve worked with quite a few organisations where the sales and marketing teams are not only misaligned, they are outright hostile to each other. Marketing can’t understand why their leads are not being followed up, and sales don’t value the leads they are given. This naturally leads to each team undervaluing each other’s roles in impacting on business growth, not only affecting the culture within the organisation, and people bringing the best of themselves to work, but also a more immediate financial impact – the bottom line. When sales and marketing aren’t aligned, but work as separate silos the entire system of business growth – and importantly efficient business growth – breaks down.

Working together

So what does marketing and sales alignment look like in practice? Really it’s the ability to bring the process of gaining MQLs and SQLs together through joined up working practices. These include everything from how, when and what the teams communicate with each other, through to joint content planning sessions for inbound marketing campaigns, and buyer enablement content to agreed lead scoring criteria and joint KPIs. The goal of alignment is to focus jointly on one business outcome that impacts directly on a business’s ability to continue growing: revenue.

Rather than marketing focusing on the number of leads they can deliver to sales, they focus on the quality of the pipeline they are delivering to sales and keeping sales up to date with content performance and engagement. And sales focus not only on conversion but retention too. Central to this approach is putting the customer at the centre of all activity – something that gets easily forgotten in the rush to grow a business as fast as possible.

Start as you mean to go on

In summary, collaboration between sales and marketing is vital for the financial health of all businesses, regardless of their size, and those who can achieve it are at a distinct advantage against those who still operate an outdated division of departments. However, it requires proper planning and ongoing training and a willingness from the top down to implement a culture of collaboration.

Seven ways businesses can ensure sales and marketing align in practice are:

1. Start as you mean to go on; set up regular meetings, reporting and opportunities for sales and marketing to collaborate and communicate. As you scale up this will be key to ensuring your teams don’t become separate silos

2. Ensure sales feed into the content development process; they are objection handling on a daily basis and as a result have front-line intelligence

3. Make sure marketing update sales on the content they are producing – whether it’s thought leadership brand awareness pieces or infographics showing product comparisons

4. Hold regular opportunities for both teams to review the content being produced and crucially, how it is performing and look for ways to adapt and improve what’s being produced

5. If you are using ABM alongside inbound marketing, partner marketing and sales together around specific accounts. This will ensure more streamlined business decisions and speeds up the process of delighting those prospects with personalised, targeted content

6. Establish joint KPIs to achieve a single goal; revenue is a better indication of ROI than number of leads

7. Set up sales training for marketing teams and vice versa; understanding each other’s challenges is key to establishing empathy between the two teams

What the B2B buying journey means for content planning

Most marketers will acknowledge that the idea of a linear buying journey is a thing of the past; the assumption that the buying process happens sequentially has been replaced by the reality that buyers flit around. They research, compare and go back to where they started and gather intelligence along the way.

In the B2B sector this is even more prevalent. The nature of the type of purchases taking place and risks of getting it wrong are often higher, so not only is extensive research an expected part of the process, this is often carried out by multiple stakeholders - the ‘buying committee’ - who will each have their own motivations that will need addressing.

Gartner calls this flighty approach to information gathering ‘looping’, and asserts that stakeholders each have around six buying jobs they seek to fulfil, from problem identification to validation, all of which are revisited during this purchase journey. They also assert that this process takes place more simultaneously rather than sequentially, meaning that sellers have less access and fewer opportunities to influence customer decisions directly. Forrester’s customer journey model illustrates the possible different paths buyers might take and it’s pretty messy!

Right content, right time What’s clear is that it’s the individual driving the buyer process rather than brands controlling the selling cycle. That doesn’t mean the traditional stages don’t exist – just that they won’t be visited in a linear way and as people self-educate and self-guide their own journey on digital channels, the average touch-point with a brand can be up to 10 or 12 times before a decision is made.

So what can brands do to ensure they are giving stakeholders the right information at the right times in their buying journey?

Well, having a deep understanding of audiences, their problems and needs as individuals and as a buying committee will be key – as will assuming they will choose a chaotic approach to information gathering right from the get-go.

Accessibility will need to be a part of content planning, so brands are ready with the right content at each of those touch-points.

Customer-first content A good place to start is by thinking about what type of information your customers and potential customers need at every stage and create stage-specific content in a variety of formats so it’s accessible when and – importantly – where your buyer ends up consuming it.

Providing information in a variety of formats does require some in-depth consideration and effort initially, but in the long-run it is not only a much more cost effective way to produce content, but it will provide the means to match format to channel as part of a the distribution strategy – after all, there’s no point producing great content if no one sees it!

How does it work in practice? Let’s consider the discovery phase and the sort of content and formats that work well here, bearing in mind this phase might be revisited numerous times.

Blogs and newsletters work well and if written from an audience perspective, serve to showcase how well a brand understands their customers’ pain points. Now provide the blog in an FAQ format (or start with the FAQs and use each frequently asked question as a discussion point for a full blog). These are often the second most read sections of a website (after the home page) and importantly they also improve SEO rankings.

Providing answers At this initial stage where self-education plays a large role, formats such as video, interactive graphics, quizzes and diagnostic assessments all work really well. They also perform superbly on social and are highly shareable.

White-papers or e-books work really well for the consideration phase but can also be used in this discovery phase, as long as they are research-based pieces. These can hold in-depth content such as industry insights, which can be broken up into smaller pieces and used in multi-channel campaigns. This makes them both flexible and very cost efficient as their content can live on in different formats which work in social, website, email and even for webinars.

To find out more about how to match content and formats to your buyer journey, contact stefanie@marketerly.co.uk for an initial consultation.

In uncertain times, B2B Businesses should make building trust their priority

B2B marketers are often under pressure to make short-term sales their priority; the constant pressure to provide leads and support the sales team hitting their quarterly targets often drives a very one-dimensional strategy.

However, in times of uncertainty, when sales cycles have doubled in length or ceased being active entirely, those businesses which have prioritised building brand trust over sales, are coming out as the winners. They know that building trust is the secret to achieving longstanding relationships with customers and prospective customers, and that when people are looking for reassurance and advice, businesses are in a prime position to take on that role of the trusted advisor.

This is supported by a recent report by Edelman ( Edelman Trust Barometer special report on Covid-19) , which found that business was considered to be the most credible source of information on the virus, ahead of government and traditional media.

And at a time when people are naturally cautious, good communication is even more key to maintaining and building long-term relationships – this is even more important in the B2B buying cycle where decisions are often made over longer periods of time, and with multiple stakeholders inputting.

Those organisations getting it right find ways to get personal with their content and have meaningful conversations with their audiences. In providing a consistent, valuable experience of their brand, and focusing on partnering their customers through a difficult time, they are in a prime position to re-engage with them when the economy begins to pick-up. They ensure their content is relevant to the personal circumstances of their customers and in doing so, prove they have an in-depth understanding of the industry in which they operate and its associated challenges.

So what are the characteristics of those B2B brands getting it right? I looked at the traits these businesses had in common and found five key areas:

1. They are true to their values and reflect those in everything they do

2. They consistently prove their capability to do the things they say they can

3. They re-calibrate their relationship with their customers and stakeholders based on their how their priorities have changed

4. They show through their content and customer service how well they understand their customers and their challenges, with an emphasis on empathy

5. They focus on how to optimise their customers’ and prospective customers’ experience with them by repeatedly adding value and maintaining visibility even when they haven’t sold to those audiences yet

From a messaging point of view, it’s important that businesses consider how essential they are for their customers and ensure they are offering guidance, clarity, and tangible value – they must show they are partnering their customers and prospective customers through these uncertain times.

If businesses can deliver on all of these, they will benefit from long-term brand awareness, digital marketing campaigns and sales conversions working much more effectively together.