When sales and marketing teams work together. Align your sales process companies achieve high performance, improved sales effectiveness, increased revenue, and improved customer service.
In fact, reports show that sales and marketing alignment also results in a 38% increase in sales win rates.
But what does this have to do with speeding up sales cycles?
When sales and marketing work hand in hand, the critical flow of customer or lead information becomes seamless.
Marketing passes important information from marketing campaigns to sales teams, which they use to improve scripts.
Data-driven sales scripts help you better understand your customers’ needs, which speeds up the sales cycle by providing the right information, documentation, and evidence.
Here are some marketing programs and processes. Align your sales process that sales teams can use to speed up their cycles:
- Lead Warming – Data from lead nurturing campaigns helps your sales team understand your prospects’ pain points, interests, behaviors, and preferences. This way, your sales team is better prepared for sales calls, reducing back-and-forth between prospects and your sales team.
- Marketing Materials – Marketing content such as white papers , case studies, white papers, podcasts, testimonials, and webinars are great sources of education and information for your sales meetings. Sales teams should actively share marketing content with prospects to speed up their sales process.
- Lead Scoring – Marketing’s lead scoring activities are a great way to determine the intent of your prospects. They will help you pinpoint the stage of your prospects’ customer journey, help you prioritize sales, and save critical time.
Stay ahead with sales support
Sales documents are an essential part of the sales process. They help enhance the impact of your sales pitch and conversation.
While most companies invest in sales enablement, it mostly comes down to the last minute, based on lead requirements.
The last-minute hassle of finding the right sales enablement documents, getting them from different teams, and then sharing them with prospects adds a lot of critical time to your sales cycle.
Fast-growing sales teams need to be proactive. And you can do that if you create a process for planning, creating, and templating the important sales documents that are used most frequently in your sales cycle.
Here are some examples of sales enablement documents that you should plan and create so you can quickly customize them to meet your prospects’ needs:
- Customer Success Stories
- Sales presentations
- Technical Architecture Workflows
- Technical specifications
- Project proposals
- Comparative documents on competition
- Reviews
- Catalogs of goods or services
You can produce them yourself or outsource them to mobile database experts, but it’s important to have them ready when the need arises during the sales cycle.
Taking a proactive approach to your sales enablement process puts you much closer to shorter sales cycles.
Creating data-driven conversation content
Every minute you spend talking to a prospect is valuable to your business growth. That’s why it’s important to plan out what to discuss during a sales call in advance.
Your sales conversations should be backed up by well-researched data about your prospects and market conditions.
When you lead a call backed by data and intelligent analytics, you empower your leads to make better decisions faster, thereby shortening the sales cycle.
But how do you build a data-driven quality checklist ? Here are some data points from existing sales and marketing data that you can use to develop your data-driven talking points:
- Interacting with potential customers and their behavior on your website, social media, email, and other marketing channels
- The history of potential customers in your database. Align your sales process such as unsubscribes, past interactions with the sales department, etc.
- Ongoing research and analysis of competitors to workflow automation and best software understand their offerings and prices to determine your unique selling points;
- Common connections or networks that you can tap into to provide social proof of the success of your brand/product/service
- Analyze potential competitors to understand what their competitors are doing and bid accordingly
There are just a few points on how you can research your prospects before engaging with them. There are many other data points you can identify and use to have data-driven conversations with your customers. Imagine how much time you can save in your sales cycle by reducing the time spent fact-checking and providing evidence.
Build a solid sales process and stick to it
Your sales team is constantly working under pressure to meet sales goals, tracking multiple leads and updating reports to show progress.
Your sales team may lose sight of the real sales process and usa lists experiment. Align your sales process with different approaches amidst the chaos of sales activities and tasks.
But by doing so, you are prolonging the sales cycle without using the most effective sales method.
Your sales process is a well-researched, analyzed, and planned process that takes into account the various aspects needed to make sales effective. Your sales team should stick to your process, despite the chaos.
Of course, it’s good to optimize the process based on feedback and knowledge, but that doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel entirely.