Collaborative Data Analysis between Marketing and Sales efforts.

A goal of our efforts should be to establish a well-aligned marketing and sales team within your company. Two way dialogue between these two essential arms of your business development team is crucial for enabling sales and nurturing leads. We must make sure they are together sharing, interpreting, and using data to propel your company forward. This will be done in a simple step. Arrange your first, and hence-fourth monthly, Marketing-Sales Alignment Meeting. Once per month, 1 hour should be dedicated to your sales and marketing team meeting in the same place at the same time with the same agenda.

What each attendee is bringing to the table

Your sales team will bring in a list of open and recently closed opportunities, broken down by status (active, closed-won, and closed-lost) and you’ll conduct an open discussion to answer the following types of questions:

• Which opportunities are ideal and why?
• How well aligned are the characteristics of those companies and individuals with our Ideal-client and buyer profiles? Click here to read an ideal customer profile worksheet.
• Which opportunities didn’t close and what got in the way? Wrong fit? Price Tag? Better Competitor offerings?

The marketing team will bring a list of leads generated since the last meeting and you’ll conduct a similar conversation:

• What common characteristics exist among the recently-generated leads that were actually sales qualified?
• What types of content did they consume?
• What keywords do they appear to have google searched before arriving?
• What are the common threads existing among our unqualified leads?
• What content and activities have attracted and engaged the wrong people and in turn wasted our time?

 Marketing can enhance this discussion by providing insights like:

• Which pages or articles on your website are pulling in the most traffic from search engines
• Whether those visitors are consuming the content and immediately leaving or if they are traveling deeper into your website.
• Whether they are converting into tangible leads

 Consistent and reoccurring two way sharing between marketing and sales accomplishes:

• Repore building between teams.
• Conveys that marketing is there to support the sales team rather than operating as some rogue wing of the organization
• The meetings will provide valuable insights valuable to both parties and in turn will influence your business strategy going forward.