April 19, 2022
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Integrating sales and marketing teams delivers better results for your company, and research proves it. In fact, every step you take to further integrate sales and marketing should deliver positive results for your company.
For example, Outfunnel’s Revenue Marketing Report 2022 shows that 25% more companies increased rather than decreased revenues when regular joint sales and marketing team meetings were held, and 33% more companies increased rather than decreased revenues when sales and marketing shared key performance indicators (KPIs).
Sales and marketing integration is essential to cannabis and cannabis-related business success, particularly as the industry gets more competitive. Following are five key reasons why businesses that integrate these two teams will win in the future.
The marketing and sales funnels are filled with holes, and the reality is it’s very hard to keep every lead in the funnel and moving smoothly through the buyer journey without dropping out of your company’s nurturing process. However, when sales and marketing are integrated and an efficient process is put in place to move leads from the top of the funnel to the bottom, far fewer leads will fall out along the way.
Ultimately, the marketing team will have the opportunity to identify and nurture leads with full buy-in from the sales team, and the sales team will have the tools it needs to engage and close highly qualified prospects.
Open communication, accountability, and committed leadership are essential to integration and the results that come with it. In fact, many companies shift from separate sales and marketing executives to a single Chief Revenue Officer or similar role to fully integrate the sales and marketing functions.
Prospects require nurturing at every stage of the buyer journey to try to push them to the next stage and turn them into a sales-qualified lead. When sales and marketing teams don’t work closely together to fully understand who their best target audience is across the buyer journey, prospects won’t get the attention they need to move to the next stage.
Instead, they may be confused or feel ignored. They may even distrust your business because there isn’t the follow-through that they expected. As discussed in #1 above, when your sales and marketing teams are not aligned, your business will lose leads and sales.
However, when they work closely together to deliver the content, communications, and experiences that prospects want, need, and expect, return on investment (ROI) from both marketing and sales initiatives will improve.
What is the definition of a qualified lead for your sales team, and is it the same as the definition used by the marketing team? These definitions need to be in sync, or neither team will be happy. Therefore, both teams must sit down together and come up with definitions for leads across the buyer journey.
An easy place to start is by categorizing leads as informational-qualified leads, marketing-qualified leads, and sales-qualified leads. For example, informational-qualified leads are at the top of the funnel and at the very early stages of the buyer journey (or not in the buyer journey at all). Marketing-qualified leads are in the middle stages of the buyer journey and should be nurtured to try to push them to the final stages. Sales-qualified leads are at the final stages of the buyer journey and are ready to make a purchase decision.
Using these lead categories, the sales and marketing teams can agree on behaviors, metrics, and other identifiers to determine which leads should be nurtured with what types of marketing content and experiences and which should be passed to the sales team for one-to-one outreach to close deals.
If both teams don’t agree to the lead definitions, they won’t work in sync. Prospective customers will be confused, and results will suffer.
Sales and marketing teams should share goals. They should be working toward joint objectives that move the business forward or there will always be friction. To that end, sales and marketing budgets can be closely aligned or integrated into a single budget.
Outfunnel’s research shows that revenue growth is 70% more common among B2B organizations that have tightly aligned sales and marketing departments. Integration delivers so many benefits – from an improved customer experience to an increased bottom-line and everything in between.
Not only should sales and marketing teams be integrated to share data, communications, KPIs, and goals, but they should also be integrated technologically. In other words, your business should invest in appropriate software that allows your sales and marketing teams to work seamlessly together.
Technology integration – including customer relationship management (CRM) software, email marketing tools, and so on – is critical to streamline processes. It saves time and reduces frustrations when everyone can connect the dots between projects, data, and results across the entire buyer journey and customer lifecycle.
Sales and marketing integration has been shown to deliver increased revenue to businesses. The five points above explain just some of the reasons why team alignment can be so beneficial. For cannabis and ancillary businesses, now is the time to consider aligning your sales and marketing functions and people, so your company is positioned for success in the future.
Did you know you can integrate sales and marketing initiatives, communications, KPIs, and more when you subscribe to the Cannabiz Media License Database and use it to connect with cannabis and hemp license holders across the buyer journey and the supply chain? Schedule a demo and see how your business can use it to reach your goals.
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