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i will be talking about the connection between sales and marketing teams today and you know what we can do from a digital marketing perspective how it connects with a business's kind of holistic view um and how how we can kind of connect teams for um cohesion across the board to make things work better for everyone so i am gonna share my screen really quick and let's hope i get the right one all right are we seeing can somebody thumbs up or thumbs down are we seeing the title side of a presentation yeah it looks good thanks okay awesome so conversations sales and marketing teams should be having really just taking a higher level look at kind of what priorities are self-identified priorities for marketing teams uh where those connections may be breaking down and different ways that i have seen um you know to to connect them and and why we want to connect them so to kick us off we have some statistics here um just high level looking at you know um from a self-identification standpoint it looks like a quarter of companies have identified some misalignment between their sales and marketing teams which kind of feeds into those top two bullet points there you know we don't want sales teams or marketing teams or anyone to be spending a big chunk of their time on things that are not gonna you know feed the bottom line so um everything we talk about today is kind of circle back to increasing and improving on on these points here this is a graphic from the cmo survey which you know looks at um big uh businesses marketing individuals within those businesses and kind of pulls them on various aspects of marketing sales digital kind of the gamut so um another view of what we were looking at at the pa on the previous slide um investments companies made to improve performance of digital marketing we can see a big big chunk of that is on analytics and marketing technology and media and search and things like that um things that are drying trying to drive increases to the bottom line not a whole lot though to to focus on efficiencies or or things that way so the challenge we're seeing here when you you look at these data points the data points on the previous slide um is that you can have really really top drawer marketing strategies and really excellent sales people but if they're working independently of each other and they're kind of existing in silos of their own environment it's it might not be enough moving into the future where the digital landscape has been increasing at such a rapid rate and we really need to work together to be able to close the deals that marketing teams are bringing in so how does misalignment happen why does it matter we're looking at a couple of themes here i've broken it down into a couple of big themes the top one i would say and maybe the most common in my experience is different thoughts on lead goals sales team looks at things differently than a marketing team looks at things so um the goal post might be different just because we're talking about different things and we don't realize it disorganized lead tracking process you know the way that marketing tracks leads and the way that sales tracks leads might look different sales tracks after the fact after they get to the website after they call on the phone all the way through to that closed deal a lot of the times marketing tracks to the website or to that in initial and excuse me interaction and then not not much further after that and then inconsistent communication across teams i think a lot of things with with misalignment come down to communication so uh just making sure that everybody is is consistently providing feedback and and sharing um what they're seeing and performance can kind of all feed into that um 25 of businesses that are seeing or perceiving some sort of misalignment between their sales and their marketing teams so looking at all of these how do we then create alignment we've identified a challenge here so what can we then do as people who exist in a team environment to improve on it so what questions should we be asking of each other number one creating communication and consistency with communication across teams i think this is pretty self-explanatory we all talk about it i think all the time you know establishing establishing regular cadence of communication i think in europe great thank you can take care of those top two points sorry um so just making sure that your your sales team your marketing teams your executive level the the technical side of things is really just having an open communication all the time uh once a month once a quarter you know just to stay on top of what everyone is doing i think that can help everyone internalize the value of um what each other is doing sometimes we get so in our own environments that we're we're looking at our metrics and we're looking at our performance and we forget that other people are looking at other things so um remembering the value of each team and what they provide and then just determining consistent definition so having regular communication can help identify where that communication um or excuse me like nomenclature is breaking down marketing calls it a lead sales calls it a prospect making sure that we're all aligned on the same thing and making sure that we're talking about the same things understanding the impact of marketing in the full funnel communication can lead into this too the traditional view of the marketing funnel does not take into account also how digital has expanded so we're looking here at marketing strategies higher level strategies prospecting for new customers getting them into the funnel they move through it sales closes a deal and that's kind of the the perspective that we're getting with the traditional view of the marketing funnel we know that users enter and exit the funnel at many different points from many different channels with social media and google and organic channels and print channels and things like that people are getting exposed to brands and um sales pitches and things like that from so many different areas at so many different points in the sales journey now understanding how each of them work together and the value that each channel and each point in the funnel provides to really each other so how does you know somebody coming in off of a paid ad then influence how they interact if they enter through um a social media post or something like that really looking at it holistically rather than just taking such a traditional view of things can help create some alignment as well and then i think the one of the biggest pieces here about aligning on your sales and marketing teams is is looking at leads and the accountability for leads so what is a lead defining what it is uh for both teams and the perspective of marketing and the perspective of sales making sure everyone understands what the definitions are what we're looking to drive and then who's responsible for what so is the marketing team responsible for just getting people in the door no matter who they are and is the sales team only responsible for those endpoint close deals or is marketing you know responsible for getting qualified people in the door who end up connecting with sales in some way or the other so really identifying what we're looking to drive who is responsible for each of those things that we're trying to drive and then how to to continue moving things forward so looking at leads and accountability another piece from the cmo survey looks at the metrics that marketers have identified as being important to their business if you notice in the bottom right corner there impact on sales and sales lift is the largest piece here so the most most people have identified that as being like one of the top most important metrics to look at but if we're experience in spirit excuse me experiencing this misalignment between sales and marketing how do we measure that impact and and lift are they measuring it the same way are there differing data points depending on what you're looking at um just so really making sure everyone is aligned on what that means and what feeds into it and then also if you notice roi is one of the smaller pieces up there so if sales lift is one of the biggest should we also be looking at the efficiency of that sales list so if we're spending more than we're earning is it actually impactful sales lift um so so just kind of uh closing the gap on that a little bit as well some of these conversations and alignment between teams can help um even outside of uh identification and things that way uh this is another kind of facet of that same view um at the bottom here you can see lead conversions are the biggest part of um at the bottom is lead convergence which is the biggest part of what goes into sales impact and lift this is a measure of you know how consistently marketers are measuring certain metrics so at the very very bottom we can see you know less than half of businesses are measuring converted leads all the time or consistently but at the top sales and revenue are tracked most of the time all the time but if we're not measuring converted leads converted leads should equal sales right so should we be measuring them both consistently they should both be looked at more consistently um how how can we make sure that lead conversions are being followed up on in a in a way that is valuable to the business and that feeds into the understanding and the value understanding the value of that lift in sales so just making sure that we're looking not only into the what the end point what we're looking for was an impact which is the impact on sales but looking into the why and the how so why are users converting how are they converting where are they coming from and we can do this through creating a lead flow process so this is kind of a reimagined marketing funnel so to speak so has all the normal steps that you would expect to see in a traditional marketing funnel with an additional one at the bottom where the sales team would document everything that happens after they close a deal and this would allow that information to be fed back to the marketing teams to the pr teams to you know the the analytics teams really everyone who's involved in this customer generation process so that we can understand what's working what is getting people to that closed deal and then we can feed that back into our strategy so that we can keep doing more of what's working and continue you know refining this reimagined funnel and qualifying uh further qualifying the people that we're reaching out to um to kind of like elizabeth said really really hone in on our target markets and our target audiences understanding who they are and what they want so we can reach more and more of those types of people there are a handful of ways to do this it does not always mean adding a step for your sales team i know uh in the you know um view of a business or in the operational side of a business it's you know adding a step for someone or adding a piece of a workflow can be a pretty daunting thing so there are tools that we can use you know integrations and automations that we can use to keep track of leads after they've reached the sales team and i'm going to go through an example in a couple of slides using google ads which is one of the most used um marketing digital marketing platforms from an ads perspective first i'd like to take a look at how machine learning and automation and things like that is currently being used it's still very much in the beginning um very much kind of um low usage right now it's still learning and trying to to get better and better but the surveyed uh marketers from the cmo survey expect to see really really huge growth over the next three years so we're talking about scaling and how do we scale efficiently bringing in the use of of artificial intelligence and machine learning really has become a center point of business efficiency and digital marketing efficiencies specifically so looking into an example here google ads has a tool uh called offline conversion importing and there's a lot of kind of technical looking things here but basically uh the the way that this works is when a user clicks on an ad they're assigned an id we are able to track that id from the ad to a website and then from the website to the offline conversion action that they take whether they sign a contract or you know work with a salesperson to complete a deal or something something to that effect so even if that end point sale doesn't happen online we have all the information to track that endpoint sale all the way back to the beginning of an ad click um and because we have that id we're also able to track the value of that sale or that lead the time between the first interaction to the close date all of these really really high value uh data points that we can then pass back into our marketing strategies so the way that works this is a screenshot from inside google ads uh basically we're able to create actions in our google ads accounts to track these ids uh to then pass information from your internal systems your crm systems like hubspot or salesforce back into into google ads so this would be an excel sheet or a google sheet that would be able to have export and then upload directly into google ads uh it sounds i think more complicated than it probably is um but essentially it's it's helping us close the loop so with digital marketing up to this point we've really been able to get very very deep on tracking users before they interact with an ad track their interaction with an ad and then to your website but then kind of what happens after the fact right has been this question mark for us this helps close that gap so we're able to now see further from initial lead action go to your website fill out a form call a salesperson what happens after that we're then able to pass that back uh and with those unique ids we're able to tie it to specific keywords to audiences to campaigns to really really help us inform as marketers our strategies it can also help google's machine learning and algorithm algorithms to consume good information so that we're able to get better information out of it so passing back you know which keywords or audiences are getting us the most endpoint revenue and really focus on them and which ones are maybe getting a lot of traction but not resulting in anything so that we can reallocate and and better focus in on valuable strategies so what are the benefits of this why should we do it why should we bother you know going through the process of pulling all this information setting it up you know creating these meetings and this communication and these workflows between teams like what is the bottom line to the business about all of it uh pretty big performance increases so when sales and marketing teams are aligned uh over 200 more revenue can be generated from marketing this feeds back into that kind of reimagined sales funnel when we're passing back information on what's working we can do more of what's working and then scale on it so we're not only working in an environment of ads looking at ads performance by itself we're passing back endpoint business information back into our strategies and then alignment between team teams can also improve close rates for the same reasons we're getting more qualified people in at the beginning who are more ready to convert to purchase to make a sale so uh it can it can improve sales close rates as well just by nature of getting better prospects into the funnel for them to to work with rather than having to weep through a good amount of unqualified traffic so i have a case study coming up looking at a b2b business in the industrial manufacturing space where we have started um you know we identified this challenge here we went through the process of having the necessary conversations between workshop as a marketing partner and and their internal resources um and their their sales teams so the case here uh we you know realized that we had kind of as a marketing partner had kind of no visibility or very little visibility into you know their endpoint sales information so we could see that we were driving all this traffic and all of these actions on their website but we really didn't know what was happening after that where those people were ending up so we really wanted to focus in on proving the value of what we were providing to them we were providing a lot of leads but were they actually valuable to the business so the strategy that we uh came up with was you know we really wanted to focus on breaking down the wall so we had conversations with our client um asking them to share back you know what counted as a qualified lead for them internally was it just somebody filling out their form was it just somebody calling their phone number or was it you know specific types of businesses or the sales team took specific actions when it was a good lead versus an unqualified lead what percentage of leads were we driving that were good you know so we could better understand our close rate close rate so to speak as a marketing team we were getting a whole bunch of people in there how many um unqualified or less qualified leads did they have to weed through uh before they got to some of those um like winners um and then you know using that information what parts of our marketing coverage were working which parts were not uh so that we could better refine our strategies so what we did we we had these conversations we you know went back and forth a few times on what information do you need what do you what can you provide us and things like that um we ended up getting some really good information from them about uh leads that came in through ads that ended up closing and leads that came in through ads that were you know people looking for completely different types of businesses or looking for directions or things like that so we were really able to identify the pieces of our strategy that were driving highly qualified high value leads for the sales team and really hone in on expanding in those areas and then looking at the the areas that were driving less qualified traffic and figure out okay why and what can we do to maybe uh improve or pull back if necessary so we really were able to identify those gaps and address them pretty quickly once we were able to get that feedback loop started and it resulted in i have a whole bunch of numbers at the bottom here but uh we really were able to provide um like real uh return on ad spend numbers for them to to show the actual bottom line performance of how our ad campaigns were running um and then we were also able to include deeper performance based reasoning into our strategies and optimization so we are no longer working within just an ad performance bubble we're including endpoint bottom line business data as well and looking at it by the numbers leads improved by almost 80 month over month um the ratio of qualified to unqualified leads that we were providing improved um significantly our cost per lead went down um over the the 10 months of our engagement uh the the feedback loop started in july so that's the last two months of this 10 months but we were able really to bring down our cost per acquisition by like we talked about with that reimagined funnel bringing more qualified people in at the beginning so there there's a higher likelihood of them converting uh ends up being cheaper and then from a return on ad spend perspective we're looking at almost 350 return on ad spend year-to-date um consistent four-figure uh return on ad spends over the last handful of months um and and consistent month over month per uh improvement so it's it has been working so far it's going to continue to be an iterative process i think that is consistent in the industry of digital marketing is that things are changing and and you know it's we have to be agile enough to keep up with it but having the necessary information to feed back into our strategies and creating these opportunities for streamlining and communication are really vital to continuing to be able to adapt and um be agile within our spaces so that was a lot in a very short amount of time but that is all i have uh questions thoughts yes jenny thank you very much what i love about this and while we're transitioning to q a is that that you and elizabeth both brought data and stories not just best practices and i think that's part of what makes this group extremely valuable and helpful so i would encourage anybody else that wants to share these types of stories to get in touch we have a speaker nomination form or a pitch form on digital rba.com too so if you have stories that you want to share i find it's the best way to learn to see what people are actually doing and the results they're getting not just glossy best practices so thank you both for for bringing the fire today um i see one question from victoria in the chat can you explain the advantages and disadvantages of companies aligned with sales and marketing teams so are there any disadvantages perhaps there's a good way of a good way of looking at this yeah yeah i think i mean there's going to be pros and cons to everything right i think the the pros here definitely outweigh the cons but if you're looking from um i mean it can bring up more questions right and it can kind of uh from a an understanding perspective like you hire people into certain roles for you know their their skill set in that role and if somebody in a sales team or somebody in a marketing team isn't fully um up to speed on what the other people are doing it can it can initially i think create some confusion um or some you know um need for education so i wouldn't necessarily say long-term disadvantages but when you're you're starting to break down those walls it can be kind of like a not a it gets worse before it gets better situation but but something that's going to require more time and more effort up front before you can get to the point where it becomes a more smooth and more seamless feedback loop so you know educating uh from the sales to the marketing team standpoint you know what they're looking for what they need how they do things from a sales standpoint and then the same from the from a marketing standpoint so um time i would say would would be maybe in the in the disadvantages column upfront time and upfront um effort and being able to have the bandwidth and the resources to allocate to that can be a challenge for sure yeah i've seen examples where sales and marketing are so disaligned or you know out of alignment at the beginning that this this type of effort runs into some friction when the uh you kind of lose track of that that mentality of the rising tide lifts all ships because there's still this this habit or tendency to try to take credit for everything right the lift and sales or the lift and leads or or shift the blame right so with this kind of initiative it works better when everybody's on the same page and sharing with the sharing in the results good or bad right there can't be any finger pointing at this point it's got to be something where you approach it collaboratively to figure it out yeah that's a great point sometimes it can be very much like a breaking down and rebuilding kind of a process where you have to break down expectations or um previously set perceptions and expectations and rebuild together rather than trying to to force fit two teams that maybe haven't worked together in a long time right yeah one other way i've seen this go sideways is in companies that have multiple divisions whether it's by region or by product line or service line and those those divisions each have their own sales teams so there might be one lead that comes in through the website and there might be in some cases maybe like a drop down menu it said what are you interested in right so that lead gets routed or funneled to the right sales team based on what what that prospect declares in their contact form or which phone number they call but sometimes that sales team isn't the best team that's equipped to handle that prospect right maybe their needs are actually different maybe after learning more about the product the with the service that they actually find out they need something different so those leads aren't being shared across teams or divisions or departments that can cause friction too because it doesn't matter how good your attribution is for that lead if somebody just puts that lead or that prospect in the waste bin because it's not there it's not a good fit for them you're missing an opportunity at the macro level absolutely which kind of speaks to um different point but like having one internal system for tracking everything and then making sure that all systems are aligned and everything like that really um giving visibility to all involved parties