Are Your Marketing and Sales Teams on the Same Page?

Whether you are the owner, marketing manager, or sales manager, marketing and sales need to be on the same page. If not, too much time will be wasted by all. What can you do to make sure both functions work together?

Focus on the Prospect
Prospects move through  one to four phases of your sales cycle: Awareness, Interest, Decision, and Action (or Conversion), based on whether they convert to clients or drop out during your sales cycle. When do they drop out? Why did they drop out?

Your sales cycle is the timeframe that buyers (prospects and customers) take to make a purchase. Review your prospect’s journey using the 4 phases below:

• Awareness – People become aware through multiple channels.
• Interest – People want to know that you solve their problem and engage using your call to action (CTA).
• Decision – People recognize you meet their need and ask about pricing.
• Action (or Conversion) – People make the decision to buy from you.
• Upon review, you will find answers to when and why prospects drop out of your sales funnel.

When and Why Prospects Drop Out
When prospects drop out often tells you why prospects drop out. For example:

• Awareness – Marketing is driving the wrong people.
• Interest – Your CTA (Call to Action)is not enticing.
• Decision – What prevents them from buying?
• Action – Why did they buy from a competitor?

Use your funnel to see what is going on.

Track Prospects with a Sales Funnel
Depending on business size, there are many ways to track prospects. A robust CRM (Customer Relationship Management) will:

• Track prospects and report by sales funnel stage, sales agent, and value.
• Trigger texts and emails to prospects (with CTAs) and reminders to sales reps to follow up.
• Analyze which prospects are stuck at each stage.

A robust CRM helps you close more sales with less follow-up fatigue!

What If I Don’t Have a CRM?
If you have marketing and sales teams, you need a CRM. Robust CRMs deliver:

•  Automation to engage with clients and prospects and to communicate internally.
• Email and quote templates that replace repetitive manual work and use current branding, logo and format.
• Segmented contact lists based on your criteria to send key messaging.
• Lead scoring so that reps spend more time on their best prospects
• Reports to show which prospects were not contacted in the last 30 days.
• Leaderboards that report on your agreed upon metrics and milestones.

A robust CRM frees you up for your highest priorities.

Keeping Marketing and Sales on One Page
Think about the twelve “touches” needed to close most sales and spread them across the four phases. As you measure your results, you will find the answers to when and why prospects drop out of your sales funnel.\

Make sure your marketing and sales teams are on the same page!

This guest post was contributed by Jon Rutenberg, owner of CCCSolutions.com. Jon helps his clients close more sales with less followup fatigue and helps them manage their prospects, clients, outreach, and mail lists. He automates marketing and sales processes, organizes client sales funnels, and segments client contacts to deliver unique messaging, installing and supporting Customer Relationship Management systems.