Sales & Marketing Alignment Starts With the Customer
With this in mind, here are three easy steps to take in making sales and marketing alignment a reality for your organization:
Develop Prospect Profiles
Develop profiles of your ideal prospects so you have a clear understanding of WHO you're both targeting and whether they are even the same. What is their typical business size? How much do they have to spend on solutions? What are the critical business issues they are looking to solve? What are the triggers that cause them to search for a solution like yours? What information do they search for to make their decisions? Developing this common understanding will create an environment for strategy development to market and sell to these prospects effectively.
Map Prospect Buy Cycles
Understanding the motivations, key phases and milestones in your prospects' buying process will help a company map WHEN it is most critical to have conversations with prospects and WHAT information they need to get during those engagements. Getting a clear understanding and appreciation for what types of sales support will actually add value is critical in this step. Sales enablement platforms, like RO|Enablement, can help marketing build templates with the right content so sales can quickly deploy them and prospects get the right information at the right time during their buy cycle.
Track & Report
Use a sales enablement technology platform to track the usage of marketing collateral and spotlights for more measurable activity and ROI calculations. The optimal sales enablement technology will also promote a common understanding of prospects buy cycles and behaviors for more efficient sales cycles and greater degrees of alignment. With RO|Enablement, along with prospect tracking, companies can get feedback directly from prospects on how useful they thought provided collateral was for them. This data gives marketing feedback on what collateral performs well (and thus what they should make more of) and what isn't being used, while sales receives immediate stats and insights on their prospect's behavior and engagement with materials for smarter follow up.
