Alignment of marketing and sales departments is a festering challenge for a number of companies. Organisations struggle to increase the transparency and communication between these two crucial departments.

In the meantime, buyers get increasingly empowered, and it is clearly apparent that companies must develop a robust lead management method with marketing and sales departments working together to form a seamless communication channel with potential clients. Only by this method can a company convert increasing number of leads into sales. The number of techniques that can help to increase the sales and marketing alignment are:

The two departments must work together to define leads and creating a scoring approach

It is important that the sales and marketing departments have similar understanding of the term “lead”. Adding lead scoring models into the process of lead management is the best way to solve the problem. This will also bridge the gap that exists between marketing and sales.

To begin, marketing and sales should both define the terminology. There should be a single definition for contact, lead and qualified opportunity. Sales should provide insights to marketing so as to describe hot, warm and also cool leads. Otherwise all efforts will be lost.

In relation to this discussion, the marketing department must communicate with the sales team in the case of lead scoring criteria. It will be ideal if an actual scoring model can be shown so a visual picture of the technique of how to determine the rankings can be obtained. Changes can also be made based on experiences gained on field work. Concentration should be there when it comes to creating scoring systems which gives importance to quality, and not quantity.

When a system of lead scoring is made with definitions that both sales and marketing have created together, there will be accountability in both the departments.

Creating SLA or Service Level Agreement

The Business to Business (B2B) process of buying is usually complex and long, and there is no understanding between sales and marketing departments on how to manage the leads. There is always the risk of prospects being lost inside the funnel. A collaboration with sales on SLA matters may help in fine-tuning the process of lead management.

To begin with, automatically routing the marketing qualified leads that are based on rank or score may help. As the sales team could start to concentrate its energy and time on the leads which are ready for purchasing services and products, this eliminates lead distribution bottleneck which occur with the manual processing.

However, it continues to leave questions on how swiftly the marketing team will give the leads into the hands of the sales team (meaning within one hour, a day or a week) and the process by which they will reach there (example: CRM notification, email sales, social media sales). Then again, once the lead is transferred to the hands of sales, the consequence must be controlled. The SLA must solve particulars of the process like

#Transparency

This concerns the tracking of leads, and the technique of sales gaining visibility into the previous marketing interaction concerning a prospect. There is also the matter of sales people offering feedback to marketing concerning lead status.

#Timeline

The duration of the length of sales to first accept and then engage leads. It concerns about how swiftly the salesperson can direct a lead to nurturing campaigns.

#Key tactics

Once sales has got the lead, it is a matter of debate of how long the marketing department will continue to communicate with its prospect. Efforts should be coordinated so that a lead should not be flooded with messaging.

The right data should be measured

For salespersons, there is no place to hide if the performance is not of a high standard. Two options exist: you hit the numbers or you did not. For such reasons, a general marketing report does not impress a sales professional. They prefer to know whether a particular effort brought in leads or not.

Marketing can assist to bridge this gap by making reports as particular as possible. Sales can understand the value which marketing brings into the company. If you want to impress the higher-ups, ensure that there is adequate data in those reports. In addition, all organisations can evaluate their marketing teams on the basis of metrics like sales and qualified leads which are generated. This variety of mutual stake in the success of sales is sure to create an atmosphere of trust between the two departments.

The right team should be given the credit. Even if leads are passed in a correct manner, there can be qualms over distribution of revenue. Sales may argue that a particular lead is sourced from a sale, while marketing can say that this lead is sourced from one of its campaigns. This quandary can be solved by closed-loop reporting. In this kind of reporting, closed deals can be attributed to campaigns which sourced them, thus ending the mystery of lead origination.

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