We’re not ones for bumper sticker speak, but when we find one we love, we’re proud to slap it on our proverbial bonnet. “There’s no I in team” is a longstanding favourite. Why? Because cross-team working is the only way to secure prospects, land hot leads and close more deals.
As digital marketers, we know all too well how the friction between sales and marketing can be the cog in your machine that grinds all your results to a halt. But once you improve the collaboration between your sales and marketing teams, it will transform your business results, and here at Zymplify, we’ve got the oil to get your cogs spinning smoothly.
Here are our top five tips for aligning your teams, so you can hit that sweet spot of collaboration and churn out the big wins for the long term.
1. Prospecting
We could bang you over the head with the basics of prospecting. But if you’re here, we’ll put our faith in you knowing how to prospect like the back of your sleeve.
If you can’t say the same for marketing’s approach to prospecting, it’s owed to the prospecting narrative fed back over history as something that’s the job of marketing and marketing alone. Wrong. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
Prospecting is the ownership of both Sales and Marketing. Repeat it. Write it up in permanent marker. Stick it over your desks!
The best way to share ownership of prospecting is to align on target personas. From there, both teams can collaboratively set up and continually optimise your prospecting process. As sales, you should identify your ideal prospect personas looking to the closed deals at the end of your funnel. The personas of your closed deals are a golden nugget trail towards the personas of your next round of perfect prospects.
2. Seize the Sale – Every Time
The first step in any successful refinement process is to focus on what’s in your control. If you improve your processes, you can weed out ‘bad leads’ with better qualification. How?
Using automation that contains all your sales, marketing and data tools together in one place. Does such a thing exist? Why else would we be here?! Zymplify is your one stop shop for automation ease.
Our platform gives you real-time access to the prospects and leads within your funnel. While marketing is increasing awareness and engagement among your prospects and ramping up the consideration levels of your leads, it’s your job to watch for their intent signals once they’re ready to buy.
Using Zymplify, our sophisticated Lead Scoring system ranks your leads from hot to cold, so your sales team can jump on the hot ones the second they’re scorching and ignore the bad leads who just aren’t for you.
With both teams viewing the progress of your prospects from the bottom of the funnel through to the top, your team can act on the most likely prospects making their way towards hot-lead status. Translation? Never miss a sale again.
3. Turning Deals into Sales
Ofcourse, closing deals is the reserve of the sales team. It’s what you’re there to do!
But how can you turn the process of making deals into a handover from Sales to Marketing?
You start by feeding back to the marketing team with the reasons for any closed deals or lost leads, so together you can spearhead improvement and improve your messaging. Using an automated funnel, like Zymplify, you can monitor those key metrics, such as: how many prospects or leads are at each stage of the funnel? And what are the conversion rates between each stage?
4. Change Your Speed, Not Your Funnel
The funnel hasn’t changed, but the speed of doing it at scale has. How do you keep up with the speed? You get the tools that work with you and not against you. And that’s where Zymplify steps in.
Our Integrated Revenue Funnel has everything measured end-to-end, so both Sales and Marketing can easily compare progress from period to period in one easily accessible digital space. All team members having access to the same data? It takes the leg work out of stats and turns stats into profit. Simple.
5. Sales Automation
Work like the wind and let your sales team focus on closing, making pitches and shelling out demos to your sales-ready opportunities. By using our automation, you can make this even easier by delivering your sales outreach emails to qualified leads. Your team can monitor, forecast and measure your sales progress using our integrated Sales Pipeline, Activities Manager and Real Time Reporting.
Don’t do it all manually and get ahead of the competition by freeing your team to sell, sell, sell. And above all – don’t be afraid of new technology. It’s friend, not foe!
Work smarter not harder. Work as one team. Work to win.
