5 more tips for marketers to help sales convert your leads
Scepticism among buyers seems to be at an all-time high. It’s easy to see why, with a crowded marketplace vying for customers’ loyalty while businesses contend with tightening budgets.
So when your business does bag a potential buyer, it’s crucial that you don’t lose them with mixed messages or requests for repeated information. That means having fully aligned marketing and sales teams.
But as explored in our previous article on this subject, which you can catch up on here, thinking that your functions run like clockwork doesn’t make it so. 82% of B2B business and tech executives say that marketing and sales teams are aligned,1 but 65% of the teams in question report otherwise.2
In practice, it’s all too common to see pipelines full of leads but devoid of business context and prospect information. As a result, sales execs must take a stab-in-the-dark approach to lead conversion that could just as easily alienate any interested parties.
This isn’t down to marketing team mishaps, but a laundry list of wider business challenges from disparate tools and data to unclear leadership and disorganized operations.
The first step to fixing this discrepancy is finding the cause. Our last guide explored five potential reasons, and this guide offers five more. Once you’ve identified the issue, you can take the necessary steps to start sharing information, messaging, and strategies across the marketing-sales pipeline.
1) Too much work, too little reward
If you were in sales and needed to hit your target quickly, what would you rather: thirty deals at $10,000 a piece, or three $100,000 deals? The former takes far more groundwork for the same potential reward. However, MQLs often arrive in droves, creating a traffic jam that not all sales execs will be eager to clear.
What can marketers do about it?
- Give sellers more attainable goals and rewards by bundling deliverables together, whether it’s your MQLs or the solutions you’re selling.
- Harness sales enablement tools and ABM’s multi-solution selling capabilities to help teams cross-sell and upsell.
- Consider a motion to rewarm or reengage lapsed accounts or dropped leads to help balance the efforts of the revenue functions between pure net-new and pipeline value recovery.
2) Lengthy sales cycles
It’s not just the effort needed that determines whether a seller accepts your lead requests, but also time. According to 6Sense, the average sales cycle is 11 months. Sales executives like quick wins and will prioritize and align with marketers who focus on strategies that accelerate deals.
What can marketers do about it?
- Use deal-based marketing to focus on accounts already in the pipeline, helping sellers avoid retreading old ground with uninterested leads.
- Prospects often need reassurance at many stages of the sales cycle. Give sales teams content that addresses their pricing, implementation, and other concerns ahead of time.
- A lot of internal change can happen in a sales cycle. Create simple, shareable assets to help new people on both sides get up to speed.
3) Seller and buyer misalignment
Today’s buyers are given too much choice and not enough clarity. Add in the fact that buyers’ problem statements change an average of three times during the buying process,3 and it’s easy to see why decision paralysis is so common. If sales teams aren’t already adapting to this shifting buyer behavior, you need to help them do it.
What can marketers do about it?
- Help sellers use modern frameworks like JOLT (Judge indecision, Offer recommendations, Limit exploration, Take risk away) to steer buyers toward a focused solution.
- Get closer to your sales enablement team to learn new insights that inform improvements. Alternatively, join prospecting calls with your SDR team to see how they handle your leads.
- Join deal meetings, both internal and with MQLs. Note relevant information that new, typically senior stakeholders joining down the line can use to shape lead conversion.
- If the sales approach needs a complete overhaul, use closed lost and conversion data to get your CMO and Sales Director to implement sales craft coaching.
- Meet existing customers to understand why they buy from your organization and use these powerful insights to give sales teams lookalike use cases.
4) A disconnected tech stack
When you’re looking for misalignment, don’t just look to your people. Intent platforms, CRMs, automation, and sales enablement tools all must be integrated into a single stack to make the most of your data. Plus, it cuts out some of the many dreary hours spent onboarding new tech platforms.
What can marketers do about it?
- Set out an ideal version of your data flow and work with operations teams to get as close to it as possible.
- If you can’t completely restructure things, speak with the sales team to identify their critical needs for a smooth data flow. Start small, review, roll out, and repeat.
- Deem accuracy as important as automation and integration by delivering high-quality information to the right stakeholders . This includes clean contact data and credible insights.
5) Misaligned messaging
Echoing the point above, it’s not just teams that can become misaligned. If sellers nod along with your campaign messaging but say something else on calls and emails, you’ll end up confusing buyers and extending the sales cycle. But as sure as the sun will rise, sellers will tweak your messaging.
What can marketers do about it?
- Before building content, get sales involved. Join client calls, listen to how prospects and clients describe challenges, and take sellers through the messaging creation process with a joint ‘sign off’ on their end.
- Sales enablement platforms are incredibly valuable for the data they produce, if nothing else. But pairing one with the above approach will massively standardize the way you deliver content.
- Hold reverse brief sessions to see how sales play-back the messaging. It’ll surface any disconnects and misunderstandings early, so that they can be corrected.
Take the next step to synchronicity
Have a clearer picture of what might be blocking the seamless flow of work and information between marketing and sales teams?
That means you can start taking steps to achieve proper alignment between these functions, letting your teams convert more leads, faster.
tmp can help. Our marketing and sales experts can work with you to review your current processes and create an actionable roadmap that brings your teams together. Just reach out to begin.
References:
2Forrester. (2024). The Future Of Marketing And Sales Alignment (Vision report).[DM1]
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/the-truth-about-b2b-sales-and-marketing-alignment/
.png)
