Table of Contents
Finding the red
Lack of actionable data and team alignment creates a drag on growth even when the economy is strong. When the economy is challenging, fixing those gaps is key to keeping your company strong.
Some common ways organizational misalignment hurts your bottom line include:
- Marketing and sales working toward separate goals
- Data silos hampering access to critical information
- Inability to prioritize revenue driving activities
- Overspending on campaigns
Let’s look at those potential revenue pitfalls in more detail to understand how they harm your business, and what you can do to plug the holes.
Aligned metrics & goals
Marketing and sales have the same goal: acquire new customers. But that goal is often lost amongst differing metrics and competing priorities.
Marketing is typically focused on driving leads. They run ads, launch email campaigns, attend industry events, create killer content, and host webinars to identify potential prospects.
Meanwhile, Sales is focused on identifying prospects, making calls, running demos, negotiating contracts, and getting the customer to sign on the dotted line.
In a perfect world, marketing’s activities would flow seamlessly into what sales is doing — but there’s often a disconnect.
Marketing is attempting to generate MQLs to hand off to sales who should turn them into SQLs. But the conversion rate for MQLs to SQLs is only 13%.
That shockingly low number means there’s a huge difference between what marketing and sales are striving toward — and that means a negative impact on revenue.
Aligning marketing and sales on the same metrics and goals will optimize both teams’ performance and improve their revenue driving activities.
Here are some ways to get these departments on the same page:
- Focus on the accounts and buyers that are in-market.
- Uncover the research and actions performed by prospects across the internet.
- Track the metrics that reveal engagement within key accounts
When marketing and sales are both focusing on buyers that they know are interested in your offerings, waste is greatly reduced.
Make data available & actionable with a CDP
True marketing and sales alignment can’t occur without confidence in the data they utilize. When data is stale or fragmented between departments and tools, it becomes difficult to deliver consistent and targeted messaging to your potential customers.
Instead, your teams will be hampered by mistimed and confused messaging, missed opportunities, and an inability to personalize outreach.
Instilling faith in your data, and tearing down silos, requires connecting your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) and Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) so data is shared freely.
If there is no source-of-truth for the information stored within those two systems it can be difficult to decipher which is accurate or prevent duplicates.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) can act as a system of record for both marketing and sales by storing all of the engagement and activities they have with prospects and customers.
- Collect customer data from different sources
- Analyze the data to establish patterns
- Associate these data patterns with customers
- Share data across different platforms
To take your CDP — and internal data in general — to the next level, consider leveraging a platform that captures intent data from across the B2B web.
By using a CDP with a trove of historical data, you can quickly gain insights into the most likely buyers on your target account lists. That will empower your teams to make smarter decisions about who they reach out to, and when.
Maximize & prioritize your efforts
On average, sales teams only spend 36% of their time on revenue generating activities.
The rest of the time is wasted chasing the wrong prospects, struggling to prioritize, trying to craft personalized outreach, and performing administrative tasks.
Increasing the percentage of time your sellers spend on revenue generating activities is a hugely effective way to reduce wasted time, improve the ROI you see with your sales team, and win and retain talent.
One of the most critical ways you can affect your sellers effectiveness is by providing them with tools that will identify the buyers who are most likely to purchase.
Nearly 70% of the buyer’s journey happens anonymously as potential customers do their own online research. But, when you uncover the activity your buyers are performing anonymously, you can hand your sellers a dynamically generated list of the accounts that are in-market and ready to hear from them.
Capture every opportunity
Even if your sellers are armed with concrete data on who to prioritize, there are still only so many hours in a day they can work.
Automation can capture opportunities that would otherwise slip through the cracks.
The right technology can provide your sellers with:
- Automated conversations with inbound leads
- Lead routing to available employees
- Automatic data enhancement
- Automated meeting bookings
- Dynamic email sends based on prospect data
Optimize your budget
If you’ve closed a brand new deal that brings in $10k annually, but a marketing campaign is costing you $20k, you’re losing money.
Here are some ways you can optimize your advertising to avoid your spend eating away at revenue:
- Only target buyers that are in-market for your services
- Personalize the message to that audience based on their activities
- Choose the channels they actually visit to improve performance
- Use a DSP to manage your bids and distribution across different ad platforms
Laser-focusing your advertising on the buyers you know are interested will improve the performance of your campaigns, reduce how much you spend, and increase your ROI.
Ready to see 6sense in action?
