Why the Handoff Between Marketing and Sales is So Important

Today’s conversation with Will Riley, Director of Revenue Operations at FitzMartin, is part two of an ongoing conversation about Rev Ops and why it’s such a big focus right now. Sales and marketing alignment is tied to revenue, so today we’re talking about the stage when someone has moved from preparing to buy to actually taking action. 

Two things to note: Sales and marketing alignment can help businesses be 67 percent better at closing deals. Any effort that can charge your revenue stream that much should be discussed.

Also, 12 percent of B2B buyers want to meet in person with a sales representative, but 71 percent of them want to start with branded searches. This is why the handoff between marketing and sales is so important. 

The handoff:

• Rev Ops focuses on alignment between sales and marketing, as well as customer success and innovation. This conversation will focus primarily on sales and marketing because they are the bulwark of the conversation.
• Most organizations aren’t effectively functioning as a joint effort between marketing and sales. If you have the right tech stack and the right processes to improve your lead quality, then you have a huge opportunity to deliver those leads to sales. The goal should be to deliver five quality leads – along with the intelligence that they’ve interacted on the web page and they’ve read certain content – instead of delivering 100 general leads with no intel.
• The lack of business intel and the lack of understanding of where the buyer is in the process presents the biggest gap in the handoff.
• Marketing tends to think its work is done early in the process, and sales often doesn’t trust the work that marketing does. We often begin our Rev Ops work by creating a high-impact event that helps sales see the value that marketing can add.
• When you’re hunting large clients, think of them as elephants, address the pain points, and work to deliver messaging that speaks to different executives in different geographies within that company. If, for example, you know that the previous vendor had issues with delivery, build your claims around delivery.
• Sales understands the value of pain points, but marketing doesn’t always see that value. Consider why any executive would want marketing to stop delivering messages before the deal is closed.

Closing a deal:

• Recent data shows that it takes 16 to 21 touches to close a deal. 
• To begin your own Rev Ops test, focus on what your marketing team is doing. How are they engaged with late-stage deals or late-stage closing methodologies? If you don’t see your marketing team engaged there, it’s a lever you can pull to get up to a 16 percent lift.
• Marketing should prepare itself for an attribution problem: when a deal closes, sales will get the credit, and that’s fair, given the time that a salesperson invests in the relationship.
• Your tech stack should minimally have customer resource management (CRM), marketing automation technology (MAT), and account-based marketing (ABM). When this trio is communicating effectively, sales will more likely have a successful journey.
• Prioritize account-based marketing. Right before someone becomes a customer, you’re looking at the need to close them. This advertising reach allows you to deliver this powerful brand into the customer’s news feed and it puts the money closer to the stage of customer closure. ABM is expensive, though.
• Practically speaking, you’ll want to perform a sales barrier analysis. Map out all the sales behaviors and marketing tools over the length of a customer decision journey. Ensure that they are equally weighted and that you’re investing in the entire journey. If you’re not aligned, none of this will matter. If you’re presenting the wrong information at the wrong time, you’re burying the things you should have shared.

“Marketing-to-Sales Handoff” episode resources:

• The next episode will address customer success and how Rev Ops overlaps it. We rarely discuss how sales, marketing, and customer success relate to each other. 
• Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives of rapidly growing businesses; and executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull. FitzMartin is a sales-first company that is driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.
• To connect with Sean Doyle, find him on LinkedIn, or learn more about FitzMartin on the company web page. 
• You can also connect with Will Riley on LinkedIn. 
• Aligned is a podcast for executives of emerging middle-market companies; executives of rapidly growing businesses; and executives who are pursuing growth and looking for new levers to pull. FitzMartin is a sales-first company that is driven by those things, and we want to pursue those things, and we know that you do, too.