Sales and Marketing alignment can be challenging, especially in large enterprises. Getting teams on the same page about targeting the right audiences, effectively creating conversions, and generating more sales is possible with the right strategy and tools. The most crucial part is ensuring that both teams agree on acquisition goals and deliverables while attracting the right customers.
A recent survey shows that organizations prioritizing alignment between sales and marketing achieved revenue goals 27% faster with a 36% higher customer retention rate than companies where team alignment wasn’t a priority.
If your marketing and sales teams can agree on who to consider a high-quality lead, marketing can effectively find and deliver these leads to sales for conversion. A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect who is most likely to become a customer based on a predetermined set of characteristics including various demographic and business attributes along with the number of initial interactions with your brand such as website visits, open emails, social media likes, and more.
Generating MQLs and converting them into customers can get complicated without automation that minimizes time-consuming and error-prone manual processes. Even highly qualified leads can quickly lose interest in your brand if they wait to schedule a call and can’t effectively access your teams and resources.
4 Ways to deliver more MQLs with smart automation
Integrate a scheduling calendar with your website, social media, and email
As lead generation begins with a prospect’s first-time engagement with your website, social media, or email campaign, it’s essential to offer an opportunity to connect at the peak of their interest. A form fill is not ideal because it adds an extra step of verifying the prospect’s and sales rep’s availability for a call and does not provide them with the assurance that someone will get back to them within a reasonable time frame. Even a 5-minute delay can increase the risk of prospects losing interest and going elsewhere.
Embedding SUMO’s Online Scheduler on your website, and adding a “Schedule a Call” or a “sign up for an event” link to an outbound email campaign are highly effective ways to connect your sales and marketing teams with new prospects. Our self-scheduling tools empower customers to book appointments directly on sales reps’ calendars, automatically filling their schedules while removing the headache of appointment coordination from the sales process. This frees up sales teams to spend more time doing what they do best – selling.
Automate lead management with Salesforce native functionality
It’s understandable that not every person who hits a “Schedule a Call” button is a good match for your company’s products or services as it’s hard to gauge the true level of a new prospect’s interest from their first interaction with your brand. Once submitted, the information they enter still needs to go through your customer relationship management system (CRM) for further verification and qualification.
Luckily, SUMO’s native Salesforce functionality offers intelligent field mapping and record creation that can make your lead qualification process more efficient and effective. The software automatically creates leads and contacts for new prospects while simultaneously capturing demographic information through customizable data fields. These capabilities, when combined with SUMO’s powerful assignment logic, empower your team to better understand lead profiles while ensuring that appointments are assigned to the right sales resource.
Align internal teams and resources
Sales and Marketing alignment requires that everyone involved in the lead generation process stays on the same page. As teams partner with each other and outside teams and vendors, it’s imperative to have an infrastructure that allows for seamless, headache-free coordination of the internal and external resources.
SUMO’s Multi-Calendar tool offers an easy-to-navigate 360-degree view of customer meetings and experiential marketing events. The calendar provides powerful filtering tools that sales leaders, marketing directors, and individual contributors can leverage to manage all of their customer-facing activities across multiple teams, locations, and venues.
Stay on-brand with customizable templates and designs
A unified brand makes a great first impression. That’s why all custom-facing collateral and messaging should align with your company’s brand.
SUMO’s highly customizable scheduling tools make it easy for marketing teams to design all customer-facing scheduling websites, appointment invitations, and reminders to their exact specifications. Content graphics, colors, and fonts can be managed through the software’s admin settings to ensure that all outbound messaging is constant and up to date. No design skills or software needed!
Successful marketing and sales alignment start with the right tool!
As your company continues to grow and schedules become more hectic, forging a sustainable connection between sales and marketing in their ultimate search for high-quality prospects can be a complicated and time-consuming task. With the right tool at your disposal, you can considerably improve shared availability and bring teams together. SUMO helps your marketing teams find more qualified leads and automatically hand them off to the sales for final conversion. And the result is an ironed-out demand generation process that ensures the expansion of your sales pipeline while generating more revenue for your entire organization.
Does Your Sales Team Need More Qualified Leads? Let’s chat! Click here to learn more or book a free consult with an expert!
