This alignment brings numerous benefits, but it also poses challenges as teams strive to synchronize their efforts. Read on to discover the top five challenges marketing and sales teams face when working toward alignment italy number phone along with insightful solutions to turn the vision of marketing and sales alignment into a tangible reality.
Handover from marketing to sales
The handoff from marketing to sales seems pretty straightforward: When a lead is sales qualified (a sales qualified lead or SQL), it’s the marketing team’s job to make sure their sales colleagues know about it.
What could possibly go wrong? The answer is... a lot .
To generalize, there are two areas where this handover can go wrong.
The first is qualification criteria, or the agreement on when the time is right to hand the contact over to sales. Think about it: what are your marketing qualified lead ( MQL ) and SQL criteria? What do you use to ensure these criteria are met in daily handoffs? How nuanced are the qualifications?
If your sales and marketing teams have different answers to these questions, the result can be a handoff nightmare.
The second issue is about the handoff mechanism . Do marketing leads automatically rotate once they are qualified, or do they already have an owner before they reach that stage? Do you assign your sales rep a task, push notifications, send them an email, notify them on Slack, or do you combine these options?
Tools like HubSpot Marketing Hub or HubSpot Sales Hub are great platforms to help facilitate this process, but the process only works as defined . The handover from marketing to sales needs to be thought out and agreed upon by both teams to be successful – a task made much more difficult if your teams aren’t operating on the same systems.
Solutions to difficult handoffs from marketing to sales:
To troubleshoot a less-than-perfect marketing-to-sales handoff, arrange a meeting between the marketing operations and sales operations teams to agree on the full parameters of the lifecycle phases.
Ask your teams what role deal phase, lead scoring, buying committee composition, and ICP level play in the timing and manner of the handoff.
Transfers can vary from team to team, ICP level to ICP level, and product to product.
Next, pull up some reports to see at what stage of the lifecycle the sales department was involved in the won opportunities to objectively determine what has been most successful to date.
Finally, once everyone agrees on the terms of the lifecycle stages and when and how to engage sales, update your CRM, marketing automation platform, and other technology to accommodate these newly agreed-upon handoff guidelines.
Disparate systems
Your sales and marketing teams may use hundreds of tools to get things done.
The result? A Cheesecake Factory menu-sized list of tech tools for your marketing operations team.Marketing and Sales
Data accuracy is everything in marketing and sales activities, especially those that require handoff. And the more tools you have, the less likely your data is to be reliable.
Too many systems can lead to:
Too many context switches and the necessary information not being added to the correct tool.
System synchronization problems and resulting data gaps
There is no single source of truth for making decisions about the success or failure of your efforts.
Misaligned transfer and scoring criteria.
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