10 Mar Is your business ‘Going for Gold’?
5 Tips to help you refine your Sales & Marketing processes
The Summer Olympics are over for another four years but the planning and preparation is an on-going process. The same should apply to your business.
When you have a success, however big or small, you need to review it and see how you can improve for next time.
Have you just won a big new contract, taken a great order, or had the best quarter/year of your business? Maybe you haven’t done as well as you planned or hoped?
Whatever the reasons, your sales and marketing processes should be reviewed often to ensure that you are still working towards your goals.
- Companies spend up to 30% of their revenue on marketing
- More than 70% of the leads generated by marketing are never followed up
- Only 50% of the marketing spend is effective, but which 50%?
- Sales teams often consider that leads generated by marketing are of little value
So, how can you improve on this to help reach your goals? Here are our 5 tips to improve collaboration between sales and marketing:
1. Speak the same language
Sales and marketing teams will often have different terms for the same thing – enquiry, suspect, prospect, unqualified lead, qualified lead and so on. If they don’t have the same understanding, confusion arises which could lead to incorrect assumptions being made about the success of marketing campaigns.
2. What is a ‘lead’?
Ensure both Sales and Marketing departments are involved with this. Marketing need to know the profile of the customers you are looking for in order to refine the marketing message to ensure the leads that are generated are of the right quality.
3. Define and agree ‘accountability’
What is each department responsible for? Is the marketing team targeted on leads and total revenue generated? Sales staff are accountable for following all leads within a specific time frame, and then setting further follow ups throughout the sales cycle converting the leads into real opportunities and then into customers.