News and Insights
Gain faster increases in revenue by aligning sales and marketing
July 6, 2020
However, this is a missed opportunity, especially today, when traditional B2B sales practices – face-to-face meetings and trade show appointments – are no longer possible. Many B2B companies typically participate in between 10 and 200 events per year, making these events a major source of sales leads. Yet today, many home-bound sales professionals are spending days focusing on cold calling or liaising with existing clients, converting only a fraction into deals.
By aligning marketing and sales efforts, you can ensure that sales teams can focus their efforts on warm leads, concentrating on talking to prospects who are ready to consider or even buy from you. By improving the quality of leads or the conversion rate even by 1%, for example, you will increase your revenue.
Let’s assume that your average sale per customer is €10,000, while your salespeople convert 1% of all leads that enter your CRM – 1,000 per month. In this case, your company makes €100,000 with 10 sales in total. If your conversion rate increases to 2%, your sales and your 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 look at each of them in turn.
Get more quality leads into the pipeline
Chances are, your salespeople have plenty of contacts out in the market, 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, while salespeople can provide ideas and share the pain points they repeatedly hear from prospects.
Some of the marketing activities to fill your pipeline:
- Virtual experiences with pre-registration
- Social media – paid and organic
- Webinars
- Landing pages with clear call to action
- Free samples
- Blogs and newsletters to promote your 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 leads further and pre-warm them, saving time and effort for your sales specialists.
Boost conversions
That 1% can make a huge difference to your bottom line, as outlined above. Working together, sales and marketing can develop up to three ideal customer personas to go after this year. With a clear understanding of their true needs and challenges, marketing teams will be able to create content that truly resonates.
If your CRM has a good number of leads, it is time to reactivate them through educational and relevant content, driving conversions up. By providing timely and fresh content tailored to market demands, you can enhance prospect engagement with a brand while retaining existing customers and boosting their loyalty. Examples of such content:
- White papers
- Authentic research
- How-to videos
- Educational webinars
- Limited time offers.
By aligning marketing and sales strategies, B2B companies can realise faster gains in revenues and profitability. Especially in these challenging times.
POSTED BY: Yulia Tribrat
