In meeting rooms in organisations around the world, marketing and sales team are having the same debate: “What’s a lead? And why are we investing in this activity but not that activity?”
The sales team believes that marketing sends the wrong messages to their contacts, while marketing thinks that sales ignores their campaigns.
In many cases, they are both right. I recently spoke on a salesforce.com webinar about the value of integrating marketing automation with salesforce.com campaigns. In my opinion, the greatest benefit this integration provides is to drive transparency and collaboration between sales and marketing. Sales gets the insight they need as to which marketing campaigns are taking place and who is responding, which in turn drives their engagement with the campaign.
Our latest State of Salesforce report found that 58% of respondents use campaigns to measure marketing effectiveness in Salesforce. I think the other 42% would benefit from these steps to get started with Salesforce campaigns. Here are my top tips to drive alignment between sales and marketing:
- Don’t overcomplicate your campaigns.
Don’t try to bundle too many activities, drops, or channels into one campaign. Instead, break them down into smaller, more manageable pieces. Make it easy for your sales team to understand the specific goals and purposes of the campaign by not trying to put too much under one campaign umbrella. - Clarify the purpose.
Customise your campaign layout to include the information you want your sales team to see. Consider including fields such as campaign overview, target market, type of activity, and objectives. - Show them the money.
Sales people are driven by results. Agree on a campaign attribution model before setting up your first campaign so you can see influenced opportunities tracked against each campaign. It is important to discuss this metric with sales — particularly if you work in a B2B complex sales environment where customers buy from a sales person. The purpose of showing campaign influence is to understand which marketing activities are helping to drive the sales pipeline, not to claim ownership of that sale.
Aligning marketing and sales doesn’t begin online, but technology will support and drive this alignment if used well. As more companies adopt this approach, sales and marketing can spend less time debating what defines a lead, and more time building the right campaigns to generate, nurture and convert that lead. Ready to get started with sales and marketing alignment? Contact us to connect with one of our experts, or download our third annual State of Salesforce report to learn more.
