In this video, Adam and I discuss the importance of alignment between your sales and marketing teams on the expectation of how marketing automation is going to change the way your business brings in and nurtures new business.
Transcript
Adam: Hi, I’m Adam Rightor, and this is another edition of Strategy Sessions.
Lauren: Hey, welcome back, I’m Lauren McGaha.
Adam: We’ve written a lot about considerations when adopting a marketing automation platform successfully in your business.
Lauren: Today we want to spend some time diving in to one factor that can go overlooked when you’re thinking about all of the things you need to consider when you want to bring on a marketing automation platform. That is making sure that sales and marketing are aligned on the expectation of how this is going to change the way you fundamentally bring in, nurture and land business.
Adam: In the past. there might have been an adversarial relationship between sales and marketing. Also, there was a cut-off point where marketing’s job was to get leads sales ready, hand them over, and then start working on the new prospect.
Lauren: When you take into consideration your new marketing automation strategy, all of those old fundamental practices might be completely thrown out the window. Basically, sales and marketing need to come together and talk about what is a qualified lead both from the sales perspective and the marketing perspective, because before marketing automation, marketing would just bring in leads and not really know which marketing activities were working and which were duds.
Sales might pick up the phone and call one of these leads with little more to go on than just a name and email address, but now you’ve got a lot more information to go on. It’s really important that before you bring in this marketing automation platform that you talk about what it means to have a sales-qualified lead. That might look different than it has in the past, because now you have the ability to nurture these leads and wait for them to come down the buy cycle before handing them off to sales.
Now when sales gets a lead, they’re way more ready, they’ve got way more insight into who this person is. What do they care about? What have they interacted with on my site? What content have they responded to? You have all of that information before you ever pick up the phone for the first time, but you’ve got to be OK with the fact that marketing might be holding on to leads to nurture them a little bit longer.
Adam: Marketing’s job doesn’t stop with handing over that lead, because the deal might not be done, so continuing to nurture them along and sell them through marketing will continue. And then when they become a client or customer, it’s not like marketing is done then, either.
Lauren: We’ve talked before about the importance of nurturing your existing customers’ relationships, and this needs to be a conversation between marketing and sales. The key here is collaboration. Before, these two departments, marketing and sales, were probably their own entities. Maybe there was a bit of a divide, but now to really be successful with these marketing automation strategies, you need to be working extremely closely together. Marketing and sales absolutely need to be aligned.
Adam: We’re all on the same team, guys.
Lauren: All right, that’s it for us today. Thanks for watching.