One of the biggest challenges facing B2B companies is the problem of aligning both sales and marketing efforts to create a more integrated, customer-centric buyer’s journey.
While many marketing and sales departments (should) have begun communicating with each other more, it’s still difficult to create a seamless relationship between both sales and marketing strategies.
In this article, we’ll look at why this is the case and the first step that B2B companies can take to integrate sales and marketing to become more effective at generating, attracting, and converting on leads.
The Sales Cycle Has Evolved – And Your Company Has to Evolve Too
One of the biggest changes in the B2B space is the evolution of the sales cycle to include more digital content and touchpoints. Today, B2B customers tend to use online information to educate themselves before they even speak with a sales rep.
This means that the old-fashioned B2B sales cycle – meeting a lead, educating them about your products, building your use case, and closing on the sale – has changed.
Today, you can expect your leads to be more qualified and educated than ever before, due to the vast amount of information available about your products on the internet.
This is why your marketing team needs to work closely with your sales team. We highly recommend meeting a minimum of once per month to simply discuss observations from both sides. You need to be able to put the proper information about your products or services out there and make it easy for a prospective client to find it.
The buyer’s journey now encompasses both the sales and marketing departments. Marketing is expected to be able to create powerful content and advertisements that create leads while sales is expected to be able to close these leads which the marketing department has provided.
Align Your Sales and Marketing Departments and Get More Conversions
While there is still a place for traditional sales techniques like cold-calling and industry conference displays, the unlimited access that clients have to the information about your company has changed the way the traditional sales cycle works.
By aligning your sales and marketing efforts properly, you’ll be able to use the power of both methods of client conversion and provide a modern buyer’s journey that is sure to satisfy your customers.
Start talking to both your sales and marketing departments today about how they can improve their performance and work more closely to provide better customer service and boost sales.
