Most industry-leading companies already know how important it is to create alignment between their sales and marketing teams, but many fail to realize that maintaining alignment requires ongoing work and continual optimization.
Today, buyers seem to be growing more informed every day. Increasing consumer awareness means sales representatives must clearly understand how to maximize the value they provide in the limited time they have by presenting a solution that satisfactorily articulates the importance and meets those needs. Companies who leverage the right set of customer interaction data benefit from a significant competitive advantage, and the role of technology in reaching new customers continues to grow.
Many people don’t think of their sales pipeline as something that can be optimized, yet the knowledge and insights gained continuously and automatically from an expertly developed integration application environment can have a tremendous impact on your pipeline. To help simplify what you should focus on, and what you should be optimizing to maximize ROI for your organization, we’ve detailed what we look at when creating a B2B pipeline optimization model, specifically when aligning your sales and marketing teams in a Salesforce environment.
Salesforce Sales and marketing alignment refers to aligning your sales and marketing teams in a Salesforce environment, with the ultimate goal being to increase revenue by more effective performance throughout your entire B2B pipeline. To create outstanding alignment in your organization, it is vital that there are explicit agreements and a common understanding regarding the definition of goals, priorities, process, and metrics between sales, marketing, and product/services teams. It’s essential that everyone is in alignment for every part of your pipeline. To understand how we plan, design, build and implement integrated application environments for companies integrating their marketing cloud with Salesforce, check out our post on HB SF Sales and Marketing Alignment.
A B2B pipeline optimization model provides a guide on how to best optimize your companies pipeline at various points along the customer journey. Key performance indicators, reporting tools, and analytics are consistently and effectively utilized to get the most out of your integration. As your team's collaboration improves and your pipeline grows, you’ll need additional insights about your partnerships and business processes to allow your team leaders and managers to make the best decisions possible.
There’s always room for improvement, especially when your customers change. Salesforce described the challenge perfectly:
“Today, it's not enough for a salesperson to solve a known problem for a buyer; buyers can do most of their own problem solving before ever engaging a salesperson. Consumers gather information on their terms using the channels they prefer. They can also leapfrog the buyer’s journey from start to finish because of many variables like urgency, price point, or an immediate business problem they are trying to address. Buyers don’t take a linear path—they take a ‘critical’ path that drives their decision-making process.” - Jim Pouliopoulos, founding director of the Professional Sales program at Bentley University [Salesforce]
B2B pipeline optimization models create a plan of action from the existing digital footprint your team's activities are creating. Through the implementation of an integrated application environment, AI takes these big data sets and interprets them for us quickly and accurately. We provide the resulting business insights and intelligence in an easy to understand format, empowering both your marketing and sales teams to use their time and resources effectively. Better information means better decisions, which improves performance throughout the entire pipeline.
There are three key areas you’ll see results when optimizing your B2B pipeline: Quantity of Leads, Quality of Leads, and Conversion Rate. However, it’s important to note that implementing a B2B pipeline optimization model is an ongoing process that requires consistent diligence and iteration to be truly impactful.
B2B companies with active marketing organizations have numerous options and resources for increasing the number of leads generated, known as “top-of-funnel” activity in your B2B pipeline. The overall size of your sales pipeline is directly proportional to the number of leads converting into sales opportunities through the efforts of both teams; the amount and quality of the data you collect, are crucial to maximizing the effectiveness of lead nurturing. Optimizing the top-of-the-funnel segment of your pipeline requires implementing key performance indicators, reporting tools, and analytics designed to make your lead generation activities more effective.
By implementing the analytical tools and reporting that make decision making easy in integration scenarios, both sales and marketing teams can focus on and provide better answers to the key questions that will drive success at the top of your pipeline:
While having enough leads in your pipeline is the first part of the equation, the second part of the equation is having the right leads. A quality B2B pipeline starts with creating opportunities with good quality leads. Ultimately, whether those leads are determined to be good or bad depends on the sophistication and accuracy of the lead scoring that takes place before leads go to sales. It’s essential to implement an effective sales methodology based on your customer’s expectations of who you are, what you’re selling, and why you’re selling to them to maintain a high-quality pipeline. Keeping a high-quality pipeline operating at peak efficiency requires your sales reps to proactively maintain consistent and thorough data entry, including correct sales stages, close dates, opportunity values and any upselling or bundling of associated products or services.
The analysis and iterative strategy required to improve the quality of inbound leads in your B2B pipeline requires an automated and efficient analysis and reporting solution. Companies can gain the complete picture of the quality of leads in their B2B pipeline through a complete integration. We take your company beyond basic alignment, integrating HubSpot, Pardot, and Salesforce to unlock new customer knowledge and insights for executive teams about their customers. This allows your team to spend more time on, and better answer, the crucial questions that impact the quality of leads in your B2B pipeline:
The final benefit of optimizing your B2B pipeline – pipeline conversion rate – is mainly dependent on the owner of the pipeline – the sales representative. It often comes down to the simple question, “Did our sales representative have the necessary domain expertise and selling ability to close this deal?” The success of each sales professional depends on their ability to execute every sales opportunity to the best of their abilities, follow the prescribed sales methodology and process, meet new expectations and client-specific needs, and to utilize the entirety of your internal resources and your partner network. The additional insights provided when you go beyond the limitations of a traditional siloed software allows both your sales and marketing teams to prioritize their resources better, improving the conversion rate of your B2B pipeline.
By implementing key performance indicators and reporting tools, we empower teams to spend more time on the questions key to maximizing conversion rates in your B2B pipeline:
It’s imperative to be very specific about what you’re measuring and why you measure it when implementing key performance indicators, reporting tools, and analytics. Analytics and reporting are a significant factor in creating alignment in Salesforce sales and marketing environments, but your results will be diminished significantly if your team can’t follow along. The simplest way to structure your B2B pipeline optimization model is by associating your new metrics with the traditional funnel structure most people are familiar with seeing.
Additionally, you’ll need to ensure both your sales and marketing teams understand and agree on the standard definitions that you’ll use to describe the entire customer journey. These discussions should include how potential customers enter, who manages them at each stage, what significant sales-marketing interactions occur along the way before closing the deal, lead qualification criteria, sales stage trigger events, and probability-of-close percentages.
Structuring your B2B pipeline optimization model in a visually familiar way can be a powerful way to build engagement and bring your team members on board. However, it’s important to remember the evolving limitations of the traditional sales funnel. Salesforce elaborates, “While every good sales organization should use aspects of the traditional sales funnel—including its segments—to organize their sales process, they should be mindful that it is an imperfect model. To win at sales, leaders and their reps should constantly update their sales approach to complement the always-evolving sales funnel.”
Starting with the beginning of the customer journey, integrating your marketing automation software with salesforce creates powerful capabilities for your organization. We design and implement a solution that allows your team to make better, and faster, decisions about which of your marketing activities are impactful.
During the middle-of-the-pipeline stages when a qualified lead is passed to sales, integrating your marketing automation software saves your team time and enhances your customer's experience. We design and implement a solution that allows your team to make better, and faster, decisions about which of leads are ready to be contacted for sales, and which leads need more nurturing.
Your lead scoring system plays an oversized role in the middle of your funnel. Making sure the good leads get to the right person quickly is essential in converting opportunities to customers at the maximum rate for your company. As your B2B pipeline becomes bigger and bigger, it becomes increasingly important to consistently improve the scoring of your leads so that your sales team’s time gets distributed effectively. Integrating your marketing automation and Salesforce CRM software is essential to creating a lead scoring system that produces the ability to optimize and maximizes the effectiveness, of your B2B pipeline.
Because developing an initial scoring system can only be the best guess, all these scoring methods are subject to incorrect assumptions, requiring testing, analyzing, and iterating the assigned value and decay factors continuously and routinely. Complete Integration models allow you to go beyond simple lead scoring to identify the significant signals amongst the noise.
The final stages in your B2B pipeline benefit enormously from integrating your marketing automation software with salesforce creates powerful capabilities for your organization. We design and implement a solution that allows your team to make better, and faster, decisions about the quality of your inbound leads, the effectiveness of your sales team, and how well your Smarketing team is working overall.
Automating and ensuring accurate data sharing between your teams creates a seamless experience for your customers as they transition from marketing to sales while maximizing immediate follow-up efforts on hot leads. By creating an integrated application environment, your marketing automation data syncs automatically with Salesforce CRM. Your marketing data can be transferred directly to your sales team in Salesforce, notifying your sales team about lead activity in real-time as they move through the journey stages.
There are plenty of metrics to choose between when it comes to determining which of your sales KPI’s are most impactful on the final stages of your B2B pipeline. Our complete integration solution allows companies to analyze and report the following metrics easily:
Results-Driven
The point of all of this is bottom line performance. Without alignment on both strategic and tactical levels, sales and marketing teams will not be able to work together as a cohesive team over the long-run. Companies that choose to make alignment a priority will see a significant impact on revenues and profitability, however, it is all too common to see failures in bridging the gap between intention and reality.
There are many benefits from integrating your marketing automation platform and Salesforce CRM. However the most important is the capabilities your organizations will gain regarding measurement and iteration. Successful implementation of KPI’s reporting and analytics are critical to any successful attempt at sales and marketing alignment, directly resulting in a better experience for your prospects and customers. There are no shortcuts to creating sales and marketing alignment in Salesforce environments, and it’s a process that requires ongoing optimization. The methodology to develop your B2B pipeline optimization model described above is essential in continuing the momentum of your alignment efforts moving forward.
Find out more over at our Marketing Operations center.