Defining Goals with Sales and Marketing

Boost Sales and Marketing Alignment by Tracking and Measuring Quantifiable Results

We can’t talk about sales and marketing alignment — and how much it can help your business — without talking about data and analytics.

Ellie Mirman wrote a Hubspot blog that explains it this way: “Using data is a great way to bring sales and marketing together to align towards key business goals and keep both teams accountable and successfully working together.”

First, measurable results must be put in place. What qualifies a warm lead? How many times do sales need to follow up? What are the measures of success or failure? Key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be set, and both teams should have a clear picture of what’s expected from each.

After the KPIs are in place, it’s imperative to close the loop. Consistently measure and track initiatives and report on their success. What’s working? Dissect those strategies and use more of them. Which ones fail? Either ditch them or tweak them to make them perform better.

Both sales and marketing need to be involved with and privy to the results. Seeing hard evidence of their efforts fosters excitement and camaraderie, which tightens up the relationship between the teams and helps them improve.

Sharing the Same Data

In order to measure the success of your marketing efforts, you’ll need software that can monitor your progress, analyze lead quality, and measure ROI. You’ll need marketing software, like HubSpot, that helps you create and manage leads, and you’ll need a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that lets you track and manage sales.

More importantly, those two software systems will have to talk to each other, just as the sales and marketing teams need to be in communication. If the two sets of data can’t communicate, you won’t be able to generate meaningful reports on close rates and new customers from your marketing efforts.

You should also look for software that automatically syncs between marketing and CRM software, eliminates duplicate records by matching with email addresses, and sends data in both directions — it’s often helpful to segment marketing leads by the info that the sales team has added to the CRM.

Once you have the software set up, you can start sharing data back and forth.

The marketing team should be sharing the history of each lead’s engagement — with your site, social media campaigns, downloads, and whatever other channel they’ve interacted with. You should also have alerts set up if a lead comes back to the site, requests a call with a salesperson, or takes another step toward a purchase.

From the sales department, marketing needs to know how the sales process is going. Records of calls and emails to leads, updates on their status, and data on whether leads have been closed — and how much revenue they’ve generated — help the marketing team calculate the ROI of their efforts.

Remember, you’re on the same team! Sharing data can only help you — both departments will have more actionable information on what’s working, what’s not, and what to change.

Identify Winning Marketing Channels

Using your marketing software, lay out the lead history of every customer. You’ve been making contact with these people at several points along their buying journey, and now’s the time to use all that data.

Look into how many customers visited specific pages on your site before they finalized their purchase or who downloaded a particular webinar or ebook to figure out which content in your marketing funnel is the most effective at driving conversions.

You can also review specific campaigns to see which ones are generating the most leads and customers or compare your various landing pages to see which ones have the highest conversion rates. From that data, you can tweak your content strategy or promote more influential pages.

Identify Winning Sales Initiatives

The same goes for your sales initiatives. Using the various software tools at your disposal, you should be able to determine exactly which sales initiatives are creating the most leads and customers. 

Once you know, you can optimize your conversions by repeating similar initiatives. You can also weed out unsuccessful sales strategies in the future and stop wasting precious sales time on efforts that aren’t working.

Goal Setting for Sales and Marketing

Both sales and marketing teams should actively participate in and have access to the outcomes. Observing concrete proof of their contributions cultivates enthusiasm and a sense of unity, strengthening the bond between the two teams and facilitating their enhancement efforts.