There’s a reason why marketing and sales team alignment is all the rage right now. It’s the foundation of many important and emerging marketing and sales trends: the shift from lead generation to demand generation ! the shift to RevOps from siloed operations! selling to a committee versus an individual with account-based marketing (ABM) ! and the move to asynchronous selling.
While this alignment has many benefits! teams also face many obstacles when trying to get it right.
Read on for a breakdown of the top five challenges marketing and sales teams face when trying to align! as well as some solutions to make team alignment a reality.
01. Transfer from marketing to sales
The handoff from marketing to sales seems pretty straightforward: when a lead is sales-qualified (SQL)! the marketing team’s job is to make sure their sales colleagues know.
What can go wrong? The answer is… many things.
To generalize! there are two areas where this phone number library handoff can go wrong.
The first is the qualification criteria! or the agreement on when the right time is to pass the contact to sales. Think about it:
- What are your marketing qualified lead (MQL) and SQL criteria?
- What do you use to ensure these criteria are met in daily handovers?
- To what extent are qualifications nuanced?
If the sales and marketing teams have different answers to these questions! the result can be handover nightmares.
The second problem has to do with the handover mechanism.
- Do marketing leads rotate automatically once they are qualified! or do they already have an owner before reaching that stage?
- Do you assign your sales rep a task! send them a notification! send them an email! notify them on Slack! or some combination of these options?
Tools like HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and Sales Hub search engine optimization mails are excellent for facilitating this process! but the process only works to the extent that it’s defined. For a successful handover from marketing to sales! both teams must reflect and reach agreement—a much more difficult task if the teams don’t work with the same systems.
The solution to marketing to sales handovers
To address a marketing-to-sales handoff! host a meeting between the marketing operations and sales operations teams to agree on the full lifecycle phase parameters.
Ask your teams what role deal stage! lead scoring ! buying understanding rush logo design services committee composition! and ICP level play in the timing and manner of the handoff.
Handoffs can vary from team to team! ICP level to ICP level! and product to product.
Next! pull some reports to see at what lifecycle phase sales was involved with won opportunities to objectively determine what has been most successful to date.
Finally! once everyone agrees on the terms of the lifecycle stages and when and how sales should be involved! update your CRM! marketing automation platform ! and other technology to accommodate these newly agreed-upon handoff guidelines.
