How to Better Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Editor's Notes

• #3: A little about me to get started. I am on the demand generation team at Marketo. I plan, execute and analyze SMB programs for the B2C segment. This includes running cross channel programs such as emails, social programs, website personalization, webinars and more. I also am responsible for running paid programs to help fill our funnel. Also, I have a background in molecular biology – I can clone and run immunohistochemistry tests. I really love excel. And I hate hate hate boats because I get super sea sick. Now onto the good stuff
• #4: Marketo is an engagement marketing platform built by marketers helping marketers succeed in the new era of marketing. Marketo helps marketers engage with their audience with one-on-one, personalized and continuous conversations across all channels including mobile, web, email and social. Marketo also provides advanced analytics that will help you maximize your ROI on your programs and amplify the impact of marketing in revenue generation.
• #5: Whether you are in sales or marketing – this applies to you
• #9: At Marketo, an MQL is a combination of “fit score”, which says how well the lead matches the ideal target, “engagement score”, a metric that scores the lead’s level of interaction with content, and “buying intent”, which tracks purchase indicators. Based on a combination of these factors, qualified leads are passed on to sales. This may be very different for your business … Another important consideration is the length of your buying or revenue cycle for your business, which would influence the decision on how often can your prospect achieve an MQL stage. Marketing has monthly, quarterly goals around MQLs and reports on these weekly
• #10: Sales Qualified Lead: Marketing passes MQLs on to a section of the sales department, sales development reps), that will determine which leads should be given to an account executive to close the deal. In general, an SQL is a lead that has high potential to actually purchase the product. Once a lead is passed to Sales, an AE has 1 week to determine if an opportunity exists and start an active sales cycle.
• #11: 1) This is the revenue cycle we use at Marketo; it’s broken into 3 buckets, starting with TOFU, where leads enter the funnel, MOFU is middle of funnel, where the focus is on marketing getting leads ready to have a conversation with sales, and BOFU is bottom of funnel, once sales is engaged. This is central to everything we do at Marketo. In fact, defining these stages rigorously in alignment with sales was the #1 most important thing we did in building our revenue process at Marketo. We’ll walk through each of these stages in a bit more detail, as it’s foundational for much of what I’ll cover in today’s presentation. You may have different stages for your business, and that’s okay…the important thing is that you define them, marketing and sales sits down and agrees what they mean, what are the definitions for moving from one to another, and what are the business process and rules for responding at each stage.
• #12: First stage is awareness, which is all about building our brand. And we do that through content marketing and inbound strategies, not with broadly targeted and expensive advertising.
• #13: 3) Next we have a subset of awareness we call Friend, not just someone who has heard of us, but someone that has a positive association with our brand – they’ve learned to like us.
• #14: 4) The red line is when people enter our database, when we have their contact information. This is where semantics really matter. These people are NOT leads. These are really just names – think about names scanned at a trade show. Many of these folks are not interested, and never will be interested in buying from you.
• #15: 5) The next step is engaged. Someone who is engaged is in our database and has had a meaningful interaction with us. For example, they have downloaded a white paper or attended a demo.
• #16: 6) The target stage represents someone who is engaged and has the right demographics. For example, at Marketo, this is a VP of Marketing who watched a demo. That target number is the first metric that we really care about. We don’t report on names that much, but we care about targets, because it tells us whether or not our marketing efforts are attracting potential customers, and not just names.
• #17: 7 )And then, when they show sufficient buying signs, behaviors that indicate that they’re ready to have a conversation with a sales person, their score gets to 100 points, and at this point we call them a lead, or a MQL, and we pass them to a sales development rep, an inside sales person who calls and qualifies the lead.
• #18: 8) Now, about 5 to 10% of them do get qualified and get moved into an active buying cycle, and are deemed sales ready (looking to make a purchase in the next 6 months), and get passed to our sales team (an AE) as a sales lead. The sales rep at that point has 1 week to determine whether or not an opportunity exists.
• #19: 9) And if they believe an opp exists, they enter the opp in the CRM. Marketing doesn’t do it, the SDR doesn’t do it. Only the sales rep created the opp, and that’s important that they do it, because that is how marketers at marketo get paid. Marketing carries a quota. Not for closed business, but for the number of opps created by our customers, i.e. sales.
• #20: While that might seem extraordinarily simple, it’s still relatively rare across organizations. According to CSO Insights, only 44% of companies have formally agreed on the definition of a qualified lead between sales and marketing.
• #23: Build a sales process and create a way to look and accept good leads Build a marketing process and create those good leads Bring the two processes together and give sales the tools to focus on the good leads Meausre and refine the process to increase the amount of good leads coming to sales
• #26: We use lead scoring for demographics fit (a VP of mktg. is scored higher than a marketing coordinator) For Asset scoring, we look at whether it’s an early stage or late stage asset and the level of engagement that’s required to consume it (for example, an infographic is just 1 point, but a 100+ page Definitive guide is 10 points) Behavior scoring: again, this is different depending on the early-mid-late stage of content and whether the behavior represents buying intent or not. E.g. visit to a pricing page +10, visit careers pages – minus 10 And of course, you need Marketing Automation software to activate the lead scoring and use it for all your campaigns.