Henry Jones
By following the 7 Pillars of Lead Generation, a no strings attached guide to increasing the number of enquiries your building products business receives, you can steadily and predictably increase revenue.
This blog covers Pillar 5 which explains the importance of marketing and sales alignment within a business, to create leads and then follow upon them.
By combining the lessons of this Pillar and with the help of the right systems and skills, you can create a seamless and integrated approach to marketing and sales that utilises the skills of both to drive lead generation for your building products business.
What’s the difference between sales and marketing?
Hubspot describes marketing as, “informs and attracts leads and prospects to your company and product or service.” Whilst they say sales’ role, on the other hand, “works directly with prospects to reinforce the value of the company's solution to convert prospects into customers.”
Marketing takes more of a soft approach, they create content, run events, manage social media, do customer research and use data to inform sales as to who is interested in your business.
Sales take up the final steps of the buyer’s journey, they speak directly to customers and aim to convert the lead that marketing has created by tailoring a personalised experience towards a potential customer.
However, both functions as part of the wider business model and both aim to attract prospects and convert them into customers.
Why should they be aligned?
Most businesses are run as a team, one person rarely works in isolation. And departments shouldn’t be any different, by communicating, sharing and working together they can perform at their peak to provide prospects and customers with the best possible experience, whilst simultaneously increasing revenue.
London Research’s The State of Business to Business Lead Generation report asked ‘How would you describe the relationship between marketing and sales at your organisation?’ Of the businesses that they categorise as ‘leaders’ 49% said very joined-up, with shared leadership and shared KPIs whilst from mainstream businesses only 31% made the same claim.
If goals, buyer personas, and lead definitions are shared then both departments can work together to attract and convert leads. A CRM can make this integration a lot smoother because data is stored and shared in an accessible platform.
How to align marketing and sales
Marketing’s commitment needs to be to handing over the right quality and quantity of leads to the right decision-makers at the right time. Meanwhile, sales must act quickly to reach out to the leads and then feedback to marketing. Both departments need to know the outcome of every lead and why that lead converted or failed to convert.
By sharing this information a feedback loop can be created which will push the continuous improvement of both departments. Findings can be put into future planning, and at what point a lead is ‘qualified’ can be defined.
Feedback also informs both functions to define together the level to which a prospect must be nurtured before being passed on to sales. Lead scoring can be used to quantify this into a consistent threshold so no prospect is missed or contacted too early.
Conclusion
Aligning the practices, goals and communication between sales and marketing should be a priority activity for your building products business.
A recent study found that “60% of respondents believed that misalignment between Sales and Marketing could damage financial performance.” So can you afford to ignore making this change?
Aligning your marketing and sales is a key component of The 7 Pillars of Lead Generation and failing to do so will damage the integrity of the other pillars. Ensuring both departments are on the same page will ensure no leads are missed or lost.
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.