Fix this unique alignment problem

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Struggling With Customer Acquisition Fix This One Alignment Issue You're struggling to reach your conversion goal — marketing team are bringing in lots of leads but the sales team is struggling to convert them. However, your marketing team won an award, and your sales team deserves a world cup.

Where is the problem with your customer acquisition strategy? And what can be done about it?

Let's dig a little deeper to understand what is making your group of A players struggling to reach your conversion goals?

Why does your Customer Acquisition Strategy seem broken?

There are many reasons why your customer acquisition strategy may not be working. But deep down, it's due to one thing: misalignment between your sales and marketing teams.

Here's how it translates to organization.

Gap 1: Your sales and marketing teams are working on different channels

In most companies, the marketing and sales teams work separately. Often, marketers know too little about their customers and their dealings with the sales team.

SDRs work on cold email and cold calls to random people, and marketers run campaigns for their target individuals. As a result, each of these parts will produce a conversion funnel based on the personality they have identified as their ideal client profile.

This strategy is still used by many companies, even some of the industry leaders, and it allows them to drive their year-over-year growth.

Now, I bet you are wondering what the problem is because this strategy seems to work.

Well, a study by International Data Corporation revealed that B2B companies' inability to align marketing and sales teams around the right technology and workflow will cost them around 10% or more of their revenue per year.

In fact, when your sales and marketing departments act as independent departments, efforts will be made inefficiently. For example, one study found that 50% sales time wasted on ineffective lead generation — chasing unqualified leads or trying to convert unsuitable leads hasn't warmed up yet.

Another consequence of sales and marketing teams working with different channels is a lack of understanding of Ideal customer profile targeting. For example, a lead that the marketing team considers qualified may be considered unqualified by the sales team. A study by ReachForce has shown that Sales reps ignore 50% of marketing leads .

Other studies have shown that 60 – 70% of B2B content generated is never used. In most cases, this is because the topic is not relevant to the buyer audience. When you stay one step ahead, you realize that if the marketing team and the sales team work together, it will be easier for them to determine what content the marketing team should produce for them. Nurturing leadership and how to use it to warm the conductors.

Gap 2: Your sales and marketing teams are chasing different results

How can you achieve a common goal if each team measures its success in different ways?

For the sake of clarity, let's say you have SaaS and your annual goal is to increase signups by 45+ percent.

Now imagine that sales teams measured their success against new free trial accounts, closed deals, and additional sales. Meanwhile, marketing teams measure their success based on the quantity, quality, and brand awareness of potential customers.

In this particular case, saying you won't meet your yearly goal is just an understatement.

If there is agreement between the two teams, they will agree on what a company-quality lead means and what the average number of marketing leads should be before the sales convert X number of users.

For example, if metrics show that it takes a sales team 15 to close 5 deals, and each of these leads should be SaaS companies with teams of 50 to 300, the marketing team will know where to focus. Where to put effort and what to do to achieve the common goal.

Likewise, the sales team will know a better way to avoid missing 5 out of 15 closed deals.

Why Adjusting Sales and Marketing is the Only Way to Fix Your Customers Conversion Strategy

So, with the gaps identified, it's increasingly clear that the solution to bridging the gap is to align your sales and marketing teams.

Here are some reasons why.

It helps maintain consistent customer communication business operations

It happens more often than you think — the sales team calls the product one thing, but the marketing team uses another term to describe the same product.

For example, the sales team calls it “Chatbot” while the marketing team calls it “Conversational Marketing Platform.”

Here is another example. The marketing team talks about the “Collaborative Growth Platform”, while the sales team talks about the “CRM”.

Admittedly, this can be confusing for potential and even existing customers, and it's a living example of a mismatch. message .

Not surprisingly, it can cost you a good first impression and as a result, a potential customer may be less likely to trust you.

In fact, 21% of B2B marketers say “giving potential customers a bad first impression of our company” is one of the most damaging factors due to poor marketing and sales. right direction.

That's why one of the biggest benefits of aligning your sales and marketing teams is consistent messaging.

Messages used by your marketing team can now warm up potential customers and set them up so the sales team reinforces the same messages. If the marketing message goes wrong, the sales team can use it to close other business.

Failing to do this, you could end up with an incorrect message, which can lead to a very confusing and inconsistent journey for your potential customers.

21% of B2B marketers consider “giving potential customers a bad first impression of our company” as one of the most damaging factors caused by improper marketing and sales. Click to Tweet

If your prospect thinks they are getting one thing based on what the marketing is saying when the sales team sells them something completely different, it definitely hurts. yours bottom line .

So it's important to make sure your messaging is consistent and relevant to the entire customer journey.

It creates a customer journey

We discussed earlier that the foundation of the sales-marketing relationship is conversion funnel . So when it comes to getting people on the same page, the best place to start is to get them to agree on the structure of the entire customer journey.

By doing so, you save your potential customers from having a single brand customer experience instead of separate silver experience. As a result, everything is tied together as an experience — from the early awareness stage customer journey transition to brand loyalty.

It fosters a “marketing first” approach.

Each department plays its own tune when your sales and marketing teams drift off course. In such situations, potential customers are less likely to react positively to a cold approach if they've never heard of you and that can harm your reputation and opportunities. close your deal later.

If both groups are a good fit, that encourages a “premarket” approach — meaning marketers find potential customers with a particular problem and create content to help them. solve that problem.

It all starts with the marketing team kicking off and nurturing new leads by creating informative content about the product and selling features and benefits by creating transactional content to fuel conversions. Then, when the prospect is about to make a decision, the sales team can take it from the marketing stand and close the deal.

It leads to a better way of evaluating results

By aligning your sales and marketing teams with a common goal and the same KPIs, you have a great opportunity to see the synergy behind their work and analyze how your organization is doing. successful arrangement in both sales and marketing. Plus, you'll be able to spot shortcomings in your customer acquisition funnel and tweak not only certain sections but the entire funnel as well.