Leads are the lifeblood of your business. You need a steady stream of prospects. But without a reliable and repeatable system for identifying and nurturing high quality opportunities, you will struggle to maintain the revenue your business relies on and generate growth. 

When it comes to lead generation and lead management, there is no longer a clear separation between sales’ and marketing’s responsibilities. Indeed, as the B2B customer journey becomes increasingly digital, self-led, and multi-channel, your teams need to work closer together than ever before.

Sales and marketing alignment is a prerequisite to successful lead generation, lead nurturing, and customer acquisition. When combined, the insight and skills of both teams enables a deeper understanding of both your ideal customer and their wants and needs. You’ll be able to identify high-quality leads more efficiently and focus your efforts on developing relationships with them.

Without that cooperation, you risk wasting resources chasing the wrong opportunities. Worse, you’re also likely to frustrate buyers who expect a more sophisticated and tailored customer experience.  

In this article, we’re going to examine some tactics, tips, and strategies you can use to bring your marketing and sales teams together for maximum results. 

Creating the Foundations for a Solid Lead Generation Strategy

The first step towards optimising your lead generation strategy is to create a sense of a shared mission between sales and marketing.  

Seek to understand where your sales and marketing processes intersect and overlap. Where do your sales and marketing teams complement one another? And are there any points of conflict, friction, or miscommunication that need to be resolved? 

Knowing these strengths and weaknesses, and defining each team’s roles and responsibilities, will provide a roadmap towards pipeline optimisation.

Perhaps sales has a limited understanding of the long term value of marketing’s activities or the difficulty in demonstrating marketing ROI. Maybe marketing doesn’t have a clear picture of what constitutes a high-value prospect or a qualified lead.

Whatever the issue, you’re only going to resolve it with open and regular communication.

Here are a few ways in which your teams can combine their knowledge and break down any “silos” or “barriers” between their roles:

Shared Objectives

Your teams need to communicate about their strategic goals and reach agreement where there is overlap. Ensure that their expectations match up. For example, does sales expect a higher number of qualified leads than marketing thinks is realistic? Or does marketing have expectations around sales’ ability to follow up that aren’t manageable?

Develop a shared understanding and set out shared lead generation metrics and best practices. You might track click through rates, conversion rates, the time to conversion, as well as agreeing how to measure ROI and cost of acquisition. 

Develop Improved Buyer Personas 

Lead generation can be expensive, so it’s important that your campaigns focus on attracting and nurturing high-quality prospects. 

Sales holds the key to marketing being able to target more prospects who look like your ideal customer. By sharing information on your company’s high-value deals, you can develop improved buyer personas. 

This ensures that your marketing efforts, from Top of Funnel through to Bottom of Funnel, can be targeted to be more relevant to people matching those criteria. From personalised emails and social ads, to collaborations, content strategy and ABM target lists, the most effective marketing starts from a clear understanding of your target audience.

Create Agreement on Lead Qualification

You can save a lot of frustration between your teams if you can get them to agree on what a qualified lead looks like. Get your teams to dig into the lifetime of the lead records for closed  and failed deals. Clarify the points of difference between your hot leads and lukewarm prospects, and start building a clear picture of the interactions that indicate buyer readiness.

This creates the basis for a lead scoring system based on insights instead of guesswork. When you can see the parameters that identify a Marketing Qualified Lead, you can be confident that you can ‘sift out’ your high-value opportunities and those most likely to convert. 

These high-value prospects should be the primary focus of your sales campaigns so your teams can work at maximum efficiency. Set up automated notifications for sales’ attention to make sure hot leads are followed up in a timely fashion.

Ensure Access to Good Quality Data

Your sales and marketing teams can’t make optimal, well thought out decisions without plentiful and accurate data. 

Everything revolves around data. Data describes your customer journey and the interactions your customers have with your company. Data allows you to differentiate between high-value and low-value prospects, and to nurture your relationships. Data informs the decisions you make as you learn more about your potential buyers.

Inaccurate and incomplete data means neither your sales or marketing teams have the information they need to answer customers’ questions, serve their needs, or make a connection. And if you can’t measure the effects of your efforts, you won’t be able to adjust and optimise your decision-making process.

Having tracking and lead capture systems in place across all channels is vital. As is integrating them to create a unified view of the customer and reviewing processes to ensure accurate record keeping. This will allow your business to properly attribute leads and conversions to your customer’s initial touchpoints.

Get sales and marketing working together to make sure you’re capturing the data they each need. Taking the time to verify the data your business tracks could identify major gaps in your knowledge and opportunities to get to know your customers better.

A sales and marketing review of data sources and processes might cover questions such as: 

• Have you got mechanisms in place for lead capture on your website and social media?

• What data do you need for a lead scoring and qualification system? What data points accurately identify an ideal customer, or a potential lead that is ready to buy?

• What information does your sales team need when evaluating, talking to and preparing to close potential customers?

• At what point in the customer relationship is it appropriate to ask for certain types of information?

• How can you use progressive profiling to fill gaps in your knowledge?

• Do you need to improve communications between sales and marketing to ensure data doesn’t go stale or leads go cold? What mechanisms can you put in place to ensure your CRM is up to date and leads are followed up? Do you need a regular weekly or monthly meeting? What automations can you put in place to trigger notifications and reports?

Embrace Digital Customer Experiences

Have you ever stumbled upon a lousy website or digital experience that was difficult and frustrating to navigate? If so, are you confident that your customers don’t feel the same way about your business’s digital presence?

Sales and marketing can work together to reduce friction throughout the customer experience, simplify information-gathering and education, and allow your customers to purchase quickly.

Analysing data from your buyers’ journeys and customer feedback can help you to understand where leads get stuck in the pipeline. You can then design strategic solutions. 

For example, if conversion rates are low, that might mean taking steps to enhance your website. You might need to improve the user experience of your landing pages. Alternatively, you could focus on copy and creative to improve the call to action. 

If the issue is that leads have unanswered questions that make them hesitate, you might focus on content marketing. Revisit your content strategy to improve their ability to gather information about your business. 

Enhancing Content Quality for Sales-Enablement

Content is often considered as a Top of Funnel, awareness tactic. However, marketing should also consider how your content strategy can create a consistent experience that sets sales up for success. 

• Perform a content audit - Does your content cover everything your customers need to properly educate themselves on your offering? Are there any gaps in materials at different stages of the buyer’s journey? Sales will have a valuable perspective to share on this. Are their sales opportunities at the bottom of the sales funnel as well educated as they would like?

• Refresh customer-facing content - Check your page stats to see if outdated content is being accessed by prospects? If so, this might be setting up false impressions that puts sales on the back foot. Take the time to refresh this content and update it with new details, case studies, or facts.

• Augment internal-use content - Don’t just focus exclusively on customer-facing content. Add to and update the internal content used by the sales and marketing teams. This can be new competitor research, sales processes, or one-pagers and product sheets that quickly educate your prospective customers on what services you provide and their benefits.

Use Automation To Your Advantage

Understanding your buyers’ journey and having clear criteria for marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) allows you to alert your team once specific milestones have been reached.

You’ve already identified the actions your high-value prospects and customers take. Now you can create events in your customer journey that trigger automated workflows for immediate follow-up. 

For example, an MQL who has shown interest in your brand on social media might interact with your website and opt-in to your email list. You can use this to trigger additional lead nurturing email campaigns that deliver targeted and relevant information to the lead. You could automatically add the lead to a retargeting ads list so you stay top of mind as they browse online. You might also trigger a notification to members of your sales and marketing team to prompt them to interact with them online.

On the other hand, an SQL who has shown interest in your product and is close to buying may have just this minute opened your service purchase page online. In this case, you can trigger a prompt to your sales team to reach out as a matter of priority in an attempt to close the sale. 

Automating your sales processes with time-critical notifications is a great way to take advantage of your automation platform. You can also use them as a sales support mechanism. 

For example, you can explore adjacent opportunities to use your automation platform to support sales through:

• Task tracking

• Appointment booking

• Pipeline management

• Detailed reporting

• Making calls from your sales automation platform

Concluding Thoughts

Combining the talents and insights of your sales and marketing team is no longer optional for lead generation and business development in a non-linear, digital first world. Both teams have a role to play in developing a better understanding of your prospects and meeting customer expectations.

To build a solid B2B lead generation pipeline, you need to break down silos between your sales and marketing teams and synchronise your lead generation efforts. Cooperation is critical.

If you’d like to find out more about how to bring your business’ talent together with automation for optimal performance, get in touch.