When it comes to planning a strategic marketing process for a certain goal, marketers can opt to have several marketing processes and marketing models in place. In fact, for large enterprise teams who run several kinds of marketing campaigns, each will be driven with a strategic plan and objective while no two strategic marketing plans would look the same. 

Before implementing any new marketing process or before starting a new campaign, most marketers already do a deep market analysis before planning a strategy. While laying down the groundwork helps plan for a seamless experience, for both, the end user and the internal marketing teams, what really makes a difference is how marketing and sales implement a marketing strategy into their whole business mix as a joint collaboration.

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The Need for Better Marketing-Sales Collaboration

One of the main goals of marketing involves supporting their sales teams and aligning efforts to help in the overall sales development process. While marketing teams will also have their own plans and campaigns to run and execute based on core company objectives and future plans, a large chunk of any marketers efforts does include aligning specific campaigns, outreach, and processes to create a better connect with the two teams. 

According to studies, businesses with aligned marketing and sales teams are 67% more efficient at closing deals. (source) Moreover, aligning both teams can generate better quality lead pipelines and revenue for the company. 

Here are a few Marketing Processes and Marketing Technologies that Sales and Marketing need to start Aligning On

Redefining the Lead Qualification Process to Suit Sales and Marketing Goals

A crucial step that marketing and sales need to always implement and agree on revolves around defining at what stage in the company’s lead journey a prospect will be transitioned to sales. In several organizations, one of the biggest reasons for a growing sales and marketing disconnect is because sales teams feel marketing does not qualify the leads while marketing teams say sales can’t close their leads. A robust lead qualification process that allows marketing and sales to put down strong parameters defining their own MQLs and SQLs and handover process helps build a healthier lead pipeline in which prospects already have the information they need, allowing sales to focus on the main part of their task – selling and closing. 

Deciding on a Unified CRM or CDP

A customer relationship platform or customer data platform is very easily a must-have martech for any marketing and sales team today. But what matters most is that both teams align on a unified platform and decide on specific CRM and CDP internal management processes and data updating processes that allows for healthier data records, notifies relevant team members on urgent actions to be taken to prevent losing a lead, aligns information on every account and shows what prospect is at which stage of their buying journey. 

Sales and marketing teams who can build a seamless CRM and CDP management process will be able to capitalize on their centralized information to ensure they have no missed opportunities, to identify gaps in current marketing and sales processes and to understand where improvements need to be made. 

Creating a Strong Content Management Process, Using the Same Content Management System

Another key role for marketers involves creating relevant brand collaterals and messaging to help support sales reps. Marketers are tasked with the duty of regularly creating adding to their content bank and collaterals and in this process, sales reps can sometimes lose out on having access to the most updated version of their product information and other documents. 

Sales reps need instant access to the most recent and relevant content collateral to answer different kinds of prospect queries, a good way for marketing and sales to have a more seamless process at his point can include implementation of a unified content management system.

A content management system that is accessible for marketing and sales people will allow marketers to manage a centralized database and list the most recently updated and relevant sales collateral easily. 

To go a step further, marketing and sales can also use their content management systems to help both teams understand what kind of website content readers are engaging with, what kind of documents or collaterals prospects seem to be spending more time on and a lot more. 

Conclusion

An integrated sales development and marketing process allows sales to close more deals while reducing the typical B2B sales cycle. In an environment where marketing and sales can optimize and automate their processes with the best of martech and salestech,  the focus remains on knowing what needs to be aligned better, when and how.

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