Sales & Marketing Alignment
#SalesChats: Episode 31
Sales and marketing departments have struggled to find common ground for some time now. These two different teams work best together, though. Samantha Stone discusses sales and marketing alignment in this #SalesChat, hosted by John Golden and Martha Neumeister.
Stone explains:
• The challenge of getting sales and marketing to align, and how this challenge is influenced by cultural norms
• The biggest obstacles to the lack of alignment, including marketing being measured only on leads and how this creates a disconnect
• Moving away from a lead and metric focus, and choosing smart alternatives like conversion rate
• How to create new goals that sales and marketing can unite on, as opposed to both teams working towards different things
• Embedding quality over quantity in an organization, starting with how we measure marketing
• The benefits to running a pilot program in order to slowly integrate changes that will unite sales and marketing
• Ensuring you find ways for short-term wins, even if they aren’t part of the long-term strategy
• Help marketing and sales understand each other’s dynamics when going through these changes, and the benefits of having empathy in this process
• Creating written down agreements between sales and marketing in order to establish structure, accountability, and expectations
• The importance of ensuring the target market is well established and well understood so that sales doesn’t waste time chasing things they shouldn’t be chasing, and marketing doesn’t generate leads that aren’t qualified
• How marketers can better understand buyers in order to generate more qualified leads
• The differences between inbound and outbound lead generation strategies
• Balancing both the art and science of sales and marketing
• How to encourage a lead to be engaged throughout the entire buying process, even after they have made their purchase
• Practical first steps to unify the sales and marketing departments
Our Guest
Samantha Stone
is a revenue catalyst who helps unleash the possible in organizations that have complex selling processes. She’s a fast-growth, B2B marketing junkie, author, speaker, consultant and persona coach who has also managed to find time to raise four boys with her husband, David. Throughout her career she has launched go-to-market initiatives and led marketing strategies for award-winning, high-growth companies including Netezza, SAP, Ascential Software and Powersoft. In 2012 she founded The Marketing Advisory Network to help savvy business leaders unleash the possible within their enterprises.
Links › marketingadvisorynetwork.com | twitter.com | linkedin.com
Our Hosts
John Golden
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
Martha Neumeister
John is the Amazon Best Selling Author of “Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories.” He recently published his second book “Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling.” A globally acknowledged thought leader, John has a passion for small to medium businesses. He is CSO at Pipeliner CRM.
About SalesChats
SalesChats is a fast-paced (no more than 30 minutes) multi-media series that provides leading strategies, tactics and thinking for sales professionals worldwide. It can be found on Twitter (#SalesChats), as a live Google+ Hangout, and as a podcast available on iTunes, SoundCloud and right here on SalesPOP! If you think you would make a great guest for #SalesChats, please contact co-host Martha Neumeister.
SalesChats is co-hosted by John Golden, CSO Pipeliner CRM, and Martha Neumeister, Social Media Strategist Pipeliner CRM.
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