Marketing leader: “How can you say we’re not providing you with enough leads? We sent you 500 MQLs last month.”
Sales leader: “Those leads you sent over just weren’t qualified. How is my team supposed to close deals if the leads you provide aren’t sales ready?”
I hear this kind of conversation a lot.
What’s wrong with this you might ask? (Apart from the obvious fact you shouldn’t argue with your colleagues at work).
The problem is that there is a disconnect between marketing and sales. Why? Because they have mixed goals.
Marketing is responsible for generating leads at the top of the funnel and sales is responsible for creating opportunities and closing deals.
For me, the reason behind these different goals is clear.
People tend to focus on the numbers they can directly impact.
Well I’ve got news for you.
Whether you’re in marketing or sales, what you should be focused on is revenue.
Ask yourself, what’s the value you’re driving? How are you contributing to the bottom line?
That’s the ultimate goal, right? To increase revenue for your business.
Yet, so many teams don’t rally around revenue.
This is why the first (surprising) step in accelerating revenue is simply to get your marketing and sales teams to align around revenue and start thinking with a revenue mindset.
That sets the foundation for revenue acceleration.
🤝 Step 1: Align marketing and sales around unified revenue metrics
The first step to becoming aligned around revenue is defining a set of unified metrics focused on, you guessed it, revenue.
Ultimately, everyone should be focused on revenue regardless of whether you’re in marketing, sales or have ‘revenue’ in your job title.
Revenue needs to be a strategic priority for both teams.
Therefore, a shared revenue goal owned by one ‘revenue team’ is key to aligning marketing and sales.
If the shared revenue goal is the primary metric for both teams, does that mean you throw all other metrics out the window? No, it doesn’t.
However, it does mean you should have a set of unified metrics that can be influenced and co-owned by both marketing and sales efforts.
The number of qualified leads
Having marketing as well as sales measured on the number of leads as qualified by an SDR alleviates the argument from above. By focusing further down the funnel, marketing can be confident that the leads they are driving are quality leads the sales team can close. This brings both teams closer together and focuses on the ultimate goal, to generate revenue.
The number of booked meetings (with Account Executives)
How many meetings are going through to AE stage? Again, this metric shows the progression of leads moving through the funnel and closer to revenue.
The value of opportunities generated
This metric is super important, especially for marketing, as it’s the KPI that allows the team to show how they are contributing to the bottom line with solid monetary values rather than number of leads.
🥅 Step 2: Capture unidentified demand
Once your teams are aboard the revenue train, you need to start finding ways to optimize the ways you’re capturing existing demand.
Why?
Because there’s only so much demand you can drive with the budget you have, right?
And if you’re struggling to get more budget from your CMO (probably because you’re finding it hard to show how much revenue you’ve bought in) you need to find ways to get the most out of the demand you’re already driving.
That starts with capturing unidentified demand.
What is unidentified demand?
P.S Want to know more about unidentified demand? Download ‘How to capture demand and accelerate revenue)
A buyer not raising their hand to talk to you shouldn’t be ruled out as a prospective buyer.
There could be a number of reasons why they didn’t convert.
- They might be interested in what you’ve got to offer but they need to talk it over with other people internally.
- They’re checking out a bunch of solutions and are gathering all their research before reaching out.
But of course, you don’t know this for certain. You don’t know what’s going on over there.
That’s why an almost exclusively digital buying journey makes it so hard for marketers and salespeople to do their job.
The prospect has already done her research independently. Heck, she might already know which provider she’s going with.
What does that mean for sales reps?
It means they’ve lost much of their influencing power.
It’s not all doom and gloom though.
We just have to get better at understanding buying intent signals on websites to predict where a prospect is in their journey.
In addition, we need to use intent data to understand who they are and what their organization looks like.
Then we need to reach out to those prospects to see if it’s a match made in heaven or not. Will the prospect get value from the solution you’re offering?
Side note: How we identify buying intent at Albacross
We categorize buying intent into ‘high’ and ‘low’.
High intent would constitute a prospect who has:
- Visited your pricing page
- Visited your product pages
- A high session duration
- Visited your website multiple times over a short period of time
This activity shows that the prospect may be in the consideration/decision stage of their buyer journey.
Low intent would indicate that a prospect may still be in the awareness phase of their journey. Much of their activity may be spent reading your blog, for example. However, these prospects can still be nurtured until they’re reading to buy.
One thing is for sure.
These unidentified website visitors present a fantastic opportunity to capture more qualified leads, in turn increasing revenue.
But of course, understanding intent is all well and good but you still need to reveal who those website visitors actually are.
You’re probably wondering how?
Well, we go over the ins and outs of how in our ebook ‘How to capture demand and accelerate revenue’.
Not only will you find out how to reveal your website visitors, you’ll also learn how to use a combination of intent data to prioritize accounts and create personalized and meaningful outreach.
If that wasn’t enough, it includes a demand acceleration framework for turning unidentified demand into sales opportunities → revenue.
Download ‘How to capture demand and accelerate revenue’.
Your future self (and your pipeline) will thank you for it.
You can always copy and paste the link to this post into your slack channel too.
Your team will love you for it.
And if you have any demand generation tips of your own, share them in the comments section below.
