Getting a ton of leads, but not seeing any convert to buyers? It’s time to examine your marketing and sales department and take action to determine what’s going on and understand how sales and marketing working together is crucial to generating quality leads and the overall growth of the company.
Does Your Marketing Team Generate Quality Leads?
In a poll done by The Daily Sales on LinkedIn, they posed the question, “Does Your Marketing Team Generate You Good Quality Leads?” to their audience. Users had four options to choose from being:
- Yes (17%)
- No (42%)
- Sometimes (24%)
- I generate my own leads (17%)
The result? An eye-popping 42 percent of voters said they do not think their marketing team is generating good quality leads. Ouch. But for many, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. There has long been a game of pointing fingers of blame between sales and marketing when it comes to lead quality. So, who’s to blame, and what can be done?
How Can Your Marketing Team Generate Quality Leads?
The bottom line is that when your sales and marketing teams are aligned, your company can sell more, sell better, and increase revenues. However, aligning Sales and Marketing does not happen overnight. For these two teams to work together efficiently, the following needs to take place before any strategies can be implemented and significant benefits can be gained.
Get Along
Yes, this is indeed a vital component for sales and marketing to work efficiently together and grow revenue. But what’s the divide and friction that makes something as obvious as getting along something that needs to be pointed out?
The sales team often has quotas to meet. Additionally, much of their income is dependent on closing sales. In return, it’s natural for sales to be critical of how marketing spends their budget and where their efforts are focused. In addition, while marketing focuses on revenue growth and numbers, the sales team is the one spending time on the phone calls building relationships. It’s no wonder these two groups run into conflict, but that does not need to be the case.
For the two to get along there needs to be understood and agreeable boundaries. Each respects the other field and realizes they’re both working toward the same goal even if they cannot see eye to eye. This can be achieved through collaborating and sharing ideas and inputs. Although two different departments, when at least one member from each team sits alongside another during meetings, there’s room for growth and understanding between the two.
Marketing and Sales Alignment Statistics:
- An aligned marketing and sales team is 67% more efficient at closing deals.
- Aligning both teams could lead to 209% more revenue from marketing.
- 1 in 4 companies say their sales and marketing teams are either “misaligned” or “rarely aligned.
Top 4 Benefits of Sales & Marketing Working Together to Generate Quality Leads
Although difficult to achieve, closing the gap between sales and marketing is worth the time and effort. Check out the top 4 benefits your company can enjoy.
1. Better Processes
When sales and marketing work hand-in-hand, they can collaborate, share ideas, and develop better processes to generate quality leads. For example, it’s known and understood that to generate high-quality leads, you need to eliminate poor prospects from the equation. As it stands, 50 percent of sales time is wasted on poor prospects, to minimize this, both teams can work on developing better marketing and sales processes.
2. Accurate Buyer Persona
To create the best buyer personas, you need to combine your marketing research with insight from your customer base, which only sales team members would know.
3. Better Sales & Marketing Content
Content marketing is a big player, and since marketing departments push out the content, they must aline with the sales team to collaborate and ensure they are targeting and personalizing the content effectively. Good content marketing should drive traffic and create revenue, and that can only happen through collaboration. This alignment strengthens the use, tone, and audience reach of content.
4. Growth in Revenue
Did you know when your sales and marketing team don’t align, you’re losing money? According to HubSpot, the misalignment between marketing and sales teams costs a stunning $1 trillion a year. Yes, you read that number correctly. That is a large sum over something as trivial as getting two departments to work together.
However, when the sales and marketing teams work together, the company can increase its revenue. In companies with well-aligned sales and marketing teams, marketing revenue was 208% higher.
Revenue can also increase through effective communication, efficient feedback, and enhanced productivity from your sales and marketing teams.
How to Align Sales and Marketing
We have gone over why sales and marketing need to get along and how that can benefit the company. Now let’s talk about how to align sales and marketing.
Produce High Qualified Leads
At its core, the most important component is for both sales and marketing to mutually agree on the definition of what a qualified lead is. The sales team can provide insights on leads that just aren’t a good fit for the company in order for the marketing team to develop an effective verification process to weed out the poor prospects.
Ready to Generate Quality Leads?
Gaining quality leads is hard, but it doesn’t have to be when you work with 360Connect. At 360Connect, we are focused on helping your business gain True-Intent leads. If you’re anxious to improve your lead quality and boost sales, we’re here to help!
- Learn More about 360Connect’s Lead Verification Process
- Discover our Revenue Growth Program
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