Sales and marketing may be two different animals, but they’re definitely from the same species. And that species has the overall goal of generating revenue in mind. Sales and marketing alignment can more rapidly and readily bring that overall goal to fruition, and one way to achieve that alignment is through closed loop marketing.
Closed Loop Marketing Rundown
Closed loop marketing lets you track marketing channels, starting from the moment a visitor lands on your site to the moment your sales department transforms the visitor into a customer. Reports provide insights on how various marketing channels are performing, which helps sales and marketing collaborate to craft strategies for even greater success moving forward.
Making closed loop marketing work requires integrating your marketing software with your customer relationship management (CRM) platform. Hint: HubSpot makes it easy by offering both. Once your two systems are integrated, the benefits of sales and marketing alignment can begin.
See Also: What's the Difference between Full Funnel and Closed Loop Marketing?
Lead Nurturing
Sales and marketing alignment can boost your overall lead nurturing powers. Since you’ll know where each lead originated and what offers the leads clicked, subsequent sales outreach can focus in a specific direction.
Another plus is the holistic view of each customer you’ll receive. Such detailed overviews help marketers identify and fortify channels that tend to deliver quality leads. Lead nurturing becomes much more effective, while lead management becomes much more efficient.
Shared Metrics
Both sales and marketing have access to the closed loop reports and numbers. For closed loop marketing to work, both teams will have to agree on metrics that are critical to the process as well as how high those metrics need to be to denote success.
Agreeing on crucial metrics opens the door to agreeing on other definitions and components that are equally as vital to success. These can include how your company defines the ideal buyer, lead qualification, the sales and marketing process, and exactly how your metrics will be tracked.
See Also: The Metrics You Gain from Closed Loop Marketing
Shared Goals
Closed loop marketing gives you the data you need to measure achievement and set precise goals. Sales and marketing alignment can happen automatically when those goals are shared, and both teams are working for the same outcome.
While your marketing team members can’t be expected to meet sales goals, they can be given goals associated with bringing in quality leads and managing those leads throughout the customer lifecycle. If you really want to prompt action as well as alignment, you can introduce goal-oriented compensation rates.
Sales reps can get paid based on the revenue number, while marketing reps can be paid based on the number and quality of leads their efforts bring in.
Faster Lead-to-Customer Conversion
Closed loop marketing provides real-time alerts each time a lead returns to your site or downloads an offer. When that information is quickly shuttled to sales, your sales team has the ideal opportunity to make their move.
Delivering leads rapidly to sales not only makes your sales team happy, but it does double duty of helping to increase close rates. Contact a lead within five minutes of its submission, instead of 30, and the odds of making a successful connection are 100 times greater. The odds of qualifying a lead are 21 times greater if the lead is contacted within five minutes instead of 30.
Improved Reporting
Since closed loop marketing comes with closed loop reporting, your teams are able to gather information throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Marketing can use these insights to enhance their efforts, crafting campaigns that generate higher ROI.
Not only does closed loop reporting provide a detailed overview of each customer’s touchpoints, but it provides hard numbers that don’t lie. Sales and marketing alignment is easier to achieve when it’s based on objective facts rather than subjective viewpoints on what works and what doesn’t.
Closed loop marketing can contribute to sales and marketing alignment which, in turn, can result in so much more. The two teams will enjoy improved communications, mutual goals, and clear guidelines and definitions to use while striving to meet those goals. Even though sales and marketing may remain two distinct entities, aligning their efforts can help create one happily successful family.
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