A feedback loop between marketing and sales triggers a flow of data and information, such as buyer archetypes and behaviors and their impact on conversion rates, allowing marketing to improve the quality of lead generation. A unified dashboard linked to a CRM platform gives companies a consistent and systematic way to track KPIs between marketing and sales. This connection also allows marketing and sales to develop a consistent strategy for prioritizing and winning accounts. Regular meetings include market monitoring, goal setting, planning ideal customer profiles, and strategizing customer-based marketing. Perhaps more importantly for internal working relationships, this connection changes the perception of marketing from a quality, nice-to-have feature to a true co-owner and critical function of the sales conversion pipeline. The existence of MQLs creates a quantifiable connection between inbound leads and revenue generation, transforming marketing from a message generator to a targeted engine for tracking specific leads that can generate higher-value sales. This makes marketing activities measurable and easier to understand.
Marketing must leverage big data and cutting-edge martech to personalize customer journeys and increase conversion rates. This greater use of data empowers marketing to generate leads with higher business value, higher propensity to buy, and supporting information that helps sales qualify them. Bundling all lead data in one place ensures a holistic overview and standardized lead qualification. This not only lays the foundation for scalable lead generation, but also ensures systematic lead enrichment and nurturing to hand over high-priority leads to sales. MQLs derived from this rich data set improve resource allocation by eliminating the need for salespeople to spend time on non-sales activities such as lead generation and initial qualification.
Marketing teams are responsible for generating leads, nurturing and enhancing leads, and creating content to qualify marketing-qualified leads. Optimizing this process is necessary because too many or too few leads can kill sales efforts. To optimize the activity of the sales team, it is important to manage two parameters: the number of MQLs per week or month and the associated potential estimated SQL volume. With a weak MQL flow, there is a risk that the sales team will be underutilized and sales targets will be compromised. With an excess of MQLs, there is a risk that leads will be wasted or become stale if the sales team does not have enough capacity to contact all leads in a certain time.
Generating SQL is the first important activity of the sales team that processes MQLs. While the generation, maintenance and evaluation of MQLs are usually highly automated in the demand center, converting them to SQL often requires an initial detailed one-to-one interaction with the prospect.
Finally, companies need to enter into clearly defined and specific service level agreements between marketing and sales. This includes underlying KPIs and goals along the entire funnel or process. Clear service level agreements between demand center and sales ensure uniform certification of SQL and division of responsibilities. This typically requires investments in marketing and sales technology stacks such as CRM and marketing automation systems. But more importantly, definition of services and process elements.
Despite technological advances and fundamental changes in how customers buy products and services, many B2B companies still view technological change as a smoldering platform rather than a flaming platform. The combined force of these fundamental changes – the consumerization of B2B buying, the fluidity of customer relationships, and the emergence of new tools – is bringing B2B companies to a tipping point. Companies that invest in platforms like demand centers and integrate their marketing and sales functions are in a better position to optimize their marketing investments, convert leads more efficiently, and strengthen customer relationships.
