If you want Sales and Marketing to be on the same page, then there had better be only one page: A single page that defines your sales and marketing process.
Here’s how to do it.
Benefits of an aligned Sales and Marketing process
Our research into alignment (and 20 years and 500 projects) have shown that building an aligned Sales and Marketing process has some very measurable and substantial benefits for your business, including:
- Increasing lead acceptance by 26%
- Increasing lead closure rate by 15% and Marketing’s contribution to revenue by 59%
- Lifting lead acceptance by another 31%, and
- Improving lead acceptance by another 27% and marketing generated revenue by another 63% when the shared process is refined.
The net effect of building an optimised Sales and Marketing process is that the lead acceptance from Marketing to Sales doubles (up by 108%) and Marketing’s contribution to revenue does better still (increases by 126%).
How to build a 1-page Sales and Marketing process
1. Get your Sales and Marketing teams in the same room, literally or virtually.
When I recorded this video, we’d have had no idea how prevalent Zoom would become. We also believed that the ‘hats in the ring’ vibe of spending time together was key. It is, but virtual workshops have many other benefits and since 2020 our workshops have all been virtual, even in our home city. By having the team together, you will be build a shared process rathe. This means that you’ll get all of the benefits of combined wisdom, as well as buy-in to the resultant process..
2. Get clear on the sales objectives
Be careful: these are not the revenue objectives but the new business targets that Sales and Marketing are going to sign up to. How many sales of what average value do you need before you can declare victory?
3. Agree what buyer problem you want to focus on
Identify and agree what problem you’re going to focus on solving for the market.
To do this, you need to think about all the problems that you do solve, analyse which of them you solve the best, and separately analyse which of them would be the most rewarding regardlesss of your strength. That is, being good at solving one problem does not make it attractive, and the fact that one problem is more attractive than others (bigger, more painful, harder for new entrants) has nothing to do with your strengths. Once you have carefully assessed all the problems on these two bases, you can choose which to focus on. Ideally, you’ll be able to pick an attractive enough option for which you are uniquely placed to solve.
4. Agree what market you’re targeting
Sales and Marketing need to agree who most has the agreed problem, because that’s who we should be targeting. This is what we call an ‘Ideal Client Profile’. Additionally, you need to identify the segments including:
- Role
- Business type
- Buyer maturity
- How much focus you will give to each of those segments
5. Agree on the required sales and marketing velocity
Next, you need to agree to the velocity that you need your sales and marketing process to generate in the first year, but also blow it out to your second and your third years.
This will help you understand the kind of engine you’re trying to build together. Making 30 sales from 300 prospects requires a very different sales and marketing process from making 30 from 30,000 prospects.
6. Agree the best end-to-end sales and marketing tactics
Identify and agree the tactics that Pre-sales, Sales, Marketing are going to use to generate that exact velocity, and how those tactics interconnect and work together in campaigns.
Bringing Sales and Marketing onto the same page
And that’s the beauty of Funnel Plan — it brings together all of those elements onto one single page. This encompasses your objectives, strategy, velocity and tactics that you’re going to use together.
If you already have a Funnel Plan, then you know what I’m talking about. If you don’t, go to Funnelplan.com and grab yourself one.
If you prefer to watch this content subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Our thanks this week to:
- Brittany Shipton & Bella Newton for blog production
- Amy Dethick for video production
- Hugh Macfarlane for scripting and presenting this week’s show
