3 Steps to Align Sales and Marketing

Drive revenue growth by unifying sales and marketing in your company

Although both sales and marketing focus on driving up revenue, their internal objectives and work process is often not similar or in sync. A business with a unified sales and marketing department is better able to align their sales process with the buying process of potential customers, and achieve business growth in revenue.

3 Steps to unite sales and marketing

According to a previous post on Cerius, Is Your Marketing and Sales Team Following the Buyer’s Journey Together?, there are three steps to address on your product line at the very minimum:

• “Identify the observable buyer behaviors and decisions that define each stage. It is helpful to start with the decision to buy and reconstruct all the preceding steps taken by the customer. The biggest mistake a company makes is to overlook all the stages a customer takes before they engage with your sales people. It’s not uncommon to have 8-12 steps on a journey. Those stages then become the stages of your demand generation funnel.

• Measure (or at least estimate) the average amount of time that buyers spend in each stage of their journey. This metric of time or “lag”, enables one to identify when a consumer has stalled. “A slow buyer is a no buyer.” With this knowledge Sales and Marketing can direct special tactics at delayed buyers. Knowing the total sum of lag time gives the organization a much more accurate view of how long the buying process really is.

• What is the conversion ratio for each stage? In other words, what percent of buyers progress from each stage; what percent leak or fail to progress within the average lag time; what percent evaporate and leave the buying process altogether? The progression rates are important to know or estimate at every stage so that the necessary number of names and leads can be calculated.

An understanding of the stages in the buyer’s journey gives Sales and Marketing a common worldview on which to base lead scoring and agreement on the all-important point at which a lead is to be handed off to Sales.”

To learn about how Cerius Interim Management can help you, please visit our home page by clicking here.