1. Contact Insights
2. Triggered Emails
3. Lead Scoring

4. Lead Response Time
These alerts help reduce the response time and ensure that sales reps follow-up within five minutes, which in turn increases the lead qualifying success rate.

5. Sales Alert
Sending real-time alerts to sales reps streamlines the process between the marketing and sales teams. Imagine if a sales rep just closed an opportunity with a lead, and this lead went to the pricing page again. Here, the sales rep can get an alert about the lead’s behavior and the rep can make another call to convert this opportunity to a deal and close it.

Intermediate/ Digest...

1: Single Customer View

When you are looking to align sales and marketing, you first have to start with a clear picture of the customer. A clear picture requires knowing all marketing and sales interactions that an individual has with your company, on every channel.

2: Common Definitions

Once you have a single customer view, it's time to create a common set of definitions to make sure you're communicating effectively. Consider the following terms and what they mean to both marketing and sales:

-- >  Lead

-- >  Sales-Qualified Lead (SQL)

-- >  Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL)

-- >  Contact

-- >  Account

-- >  Opportunity

3: Aligned Goals

Measuring sales and marketing off the same metric is the only way to ensure goals are aligned.

4: Notifications

The idea that marketing doesn't do a lot for organizations comes from the lack of visibility into marketing's influence. The easiest way to solve this is to give sales visibility into their leads, and into their prospects' interactions with marketing assets. I'd suggest notifying sales reps in a few different ways.

-- >  Email notifications

-- >  CRM notifications

5: Support Campaigns

Many salespeople have a lot of things on their plate; a great way to help build the bridge is to give them some support. These campaign ideas are very easy and can greatly increase their opinion of the marketing team and your effectiveness.

-- >  Lost Deal Campaign

-- >  Cold-Lead Drip

-- >  Competitive Drip

-- >  Thought Leadership Drip

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CMOs must not position marketing as a tactical support function, instead a partner in driving profitable revenue growth.

Advanced/ Digest...

Pat’s first order of business was to meet with the head of sales, as well as multiple sales managers and individual reps. In each meeting s/he asked one simple question: What do you need from marketing? Pat received many, many answers to this question that all added up to one thing: better day-to-day support.

Nine months after s/he started, Pat was ready to survey sales to measure how much sentiment about marketing’s value had increased. The internal survey revealed that sales reps and leaders viewed marketing as contributing little to no value . . . again! Pat was let go before s/he had been there a year.

Clearly, Pat’s big mistake was positioning marketing as a tactical support function instead of a partner in driving profitable revenue growth. When Pat asked sales what it wanted from marketing, s/he effectively delivered the message that marketing has no idea what to do. In a world defined by empowered b-to-b buyers who typically don’t engage with sales until they are more than halfway through their buying process, Pat should have had a better idea of how marketing should align with sales vs. supporting every single ad hoc request from every single rep.

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Summarized...

Let me propose a replacement for BANT. I call it PAM – Persona qualification, Account qualification, Motivation.

Persona Qualification

First, provide a process-level and a prospect-level value proposition.

The process-level value proposition answers the question, “Why should I listen to you at all?” The prospect-level value proposition frames your value proposition from a buyer-persona perspective.

For example, you might say, “We have some new research that marketing executives faced with lead follow-up and lead conversion challenges find very helpful. With this new approach, companies are seeing 30% to 40% increases in lead conversion.”

Now you have possibly earned the right to ask them a question or two. Explain that you don’t want to waste their time and so you’d like to ask two questions. Ask what their role is in the company and how the company makes decisions about the kinds of solutions you sell.

Account Qualification

Next, make sure the account meets the criteria you look for. Again, frame your questions in terms of not wanting to waste the time of the prospect.

A good database marketing strategy and solid CRM implementation is critical.

But persona and account qualification say nothing about when the account might actually buy, and that’s the reason for the final area of qualification.

Motivation

Is the person you’re talking to motivated enough to help you get to the people or person who matters?

What pain do they have that maps to what you sell?

How big of a priority is eliminating that pain, both for the person you are speaking with and for the others involved in the decision process? Insight into motivations can tell you a lot about the probability of a purchase and timeline for purchase.

Digest...

One of the fundamental challenges going forward in building out solution selling organizations is its original premise was that the sale was driven by a ‘non-expert to an expert’ and that is no longer the case. Many sales approaches start from the assumption that the salesperson is the primary source of knowledge and customers rely on sales to educate them on what their ‘solution’ could do for their business. Nowadays, the buyer is in much more control and has knowledge or knows how to get it from sources unmanaged, uncontrolled and unable to be influenced by the seller.

Whereas these high performers have found a way to not only sell more effectively, but sell differently. They have found the right formula to engage customers in a way they find meaningful and create value far beyond ‘supplying’ their ‘product’ at the best price.  The “sellers dilemma’ continues to manifest itself in many ways. And providing customers true business value thru the sales process and beyond is just another example of how challenging it is becoming to be a successful in today’s B2B market.