It is common for marketing and sales teams in B2B organisations to work in separate silos. However, aligning these two core functions can positively impact your organisation's bottom line.
At The Pulse Rooms, understanding the frontline sales environment is a core starting point when working with clients to develop a growth marketing strategy. It helps us to uncover insightful customer needs, identify potential barriers to purchase, and ensure any marketing activities move prospects along the funnel to close the deal.
Here are some benefits B2B organisations can expect when effectively aligning marketing and sales efforts.
Deliver greater value to your customers
Your sales team constantly communicates and interacts with existing and prospective customers. This is the perfect time to gather direct feedback – uncovering pain points and the motivation for purchasing a particular product or service. You can use these insights to refine your product or service offering, ensuring it meets customer needs and wants continuously. By enhancing the value offered, your organisation is more likely to retain its existing customers, as well as attract new ones at the same time.
Create more effective marketing assets that help to close the sale
In our experience, when sales and marketing teams aren’t effectively aligned, sales reps struggle to know which collateral they should send to prospects. This means that the content created by the marketing team often goes to waste. By bringing the two functions closer together, you can create assets, such as product sheets and white papers, that your sales reps can use to move prospects quickly along the funnel and close the deal. As your sales team works directly with customers, it’s always beneficial to involve them in developing new marketing campaigns and content.
Understand what’s needed beyond the sale
Selling a product or service in a B2B context often isn’t just a simple one-off transaction. Customers might go through numerous stages before, during and after purchase. Mapping out an agreed customer journey in its entirety can help you to identify the different forms of marketing required at each point. Determining what’s needed to close the deal can take up much of your focus and energy, but you must also consider how marketing can support postsale interactions.
This is crucial to retaining customers and driving repeat purchases. The marketing channel you use to do this doesn’t have to be overly complicated. For example, arranging a quarterly event for loyal customers might be a great way to keep the interaction going and make them feel valued.
Enjoy higher retention rates and win rates
At a foundational level, any business wants to retain and attract new customers, which is how they grow. Research by Aberdeen Group has shown that when organisations align sales and marketing functions, they enjoy 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher win rates.
