News and Insights
Accelerate revenue growth by aligning sales and marketing
July 7, 2020
Many B2B industrial businesses still view marketing as a support function that is responsible for activities such as producing brochures or preparing a booth for an upcoming trade show. However, taking this view creates a missed opportunity, especially today, when common B2B sales practices – face-to-face meetings and trade show appointments – are not possible. With their traditional source of lead generation unavailable to them, many home-bound sales professionals are spending days focusing on cold calling or liaising with existing clients, converting only a fraction of their discussions into deals.
By closely aligning marketing and sales efforts you can ensure that sales teams can concentrate their efforts on warm leads. Improving the quality of leads or conversion rates by even 1% can make a meaningful difference in your revenue.
Let’s assume that your average sale per customer is €10,000 and your salespeople convert 1% of all leads that enter your CRM – 1,000 per month. In this scenario, your company would make €100,000 with 10 sales. If your conversion rate increases to 2%, your sales and revenue will double (20 customers and €200,000 a month respectively).
You can achieve this target by either generating more leads or by increasing the conversion rate.
Let’s explore each of these in more detail.
Get more quality leads into the pipeline
Chances are your salespeople have plenty of contacts, however, not all of them are ready to make a purchase at the time of contact. Cold calling is time consuming, inefficient and may harm your brand reputation. Instead, ask your marketing team to boost top-of-the-funnel activities. Salespeople can contribute to these efforts by providing insight for their marketing colleagues into the key pain points and challenges their prospects face.
Some of the marketing activities that can be used to fill your pipeline include:
- Virtual experiences with pre-registration
- Social media – paid and organic
- Webinars
- Landing pages with clear calls to action
- Free samples
- Blogs and e-newsletters to promote educational content
- Google advertising
It is important to remember that not all new leads are ready to receive a phone call from your salespeople. Marketing automation can help you to nurture new leads into warm leads, saving time and effort for your sales specialists.
Boost conversions
We’ve already established that 1% growth can make a huge difference to your bottom line. To make progress toward that goal, have your sales and marketing teams collaborate to develop up to three ideal customer personas to pursue. With a clear understanding of the true needs and challenges of their target audience, marketing teams will be able to create content that truly resonates.
If your CRM system has a good number of leads in it already, it is time to reactivate them through educational and relevant content, which can help drive conversions up. By providing timely and fresh content tailored to market demands, you can enhance engagement with your prospects while retaining existing customers and boosting their loyalty. Here are some examples of content that can be effective:
- White papers
- Original research
- How-to videos
- Educational webinars
- Limited-time offers
The bottom line: by aligning marketing and sales strategies, B2B companies can accelerate revenue growth and profitability. Especially in these challenging times. To learn more, download this Playbook outlining six steps to boost sales in 2020 and beyond.
POSTED BY: Yulia Tribrat
