In the end, B2B marketing is all about driving leads and turning those leads into opportunities and net new revenue.
To make that happen, you must work closely with sales. (You’ve probably figured that out by now.) But sometimes we struggle with how to work with sales.
If you’re looking for tactical ways to increase your alignment with sales, then you’re in luck. On the latest episode of the #FlipMyFunnel podcast, David Tam, Director of Marketing at OneLogin, talked about living out alignment on a daily basis.
Here’s what we’re unpacking today:
- Tactical tips on how to operationalize your work with sales
- Seeking out sales feedback
- Iterating campaigns based on sales feedback
- Why enablement is the secret sauce to ABM
This post is based on a podcast with David Tam. If you’d like to listen to the full episode, you can check it out here and below.
Tactical tips for operationalizing marketing & sales alignment:
David: The way we work with sales changes over time, as new technology emerges and as people change the way they like to work. But for now, just having regular meetings is really important. It’s crucial to meet with sales leaders. And these need to be one-on-one meetings or smaller group meetings. It’s also important to meet, not just with the sales managers, but with the reps themselves. And meet with them in their own settings.
Secondly, just make yourself available. Whether through email, or Slack, or even through text message, just keep those lines of communication open.
Seeking out sales feedback:
David: As much as we’d like to get it right the first time, each campaign is a learning process. With any campaign in marketing, you can’t just go off, run it on your own, and not ask for feedback. And sales feedback is the most important type of feedback you could get, right?
So, we proactively seek feedback from sales on a regular basis. We hold regular team meetings, manager meetings, rep meetings, and we listen in on calls. We strive to source any type of feedback that we get.
Of course we don’t act on every bit of feedback that we get. But we do incorporate it all into a structure that allows us to identify where some real areas of concern might be. And if more than one person is saying the same thing, we really hone in on that.
Iterating campaigns based on sales feedback:
David: As far as how we incorporate feedback into our campaigns, here’s a specific example:
If we’re launching new messaging or playbooks or content on the website, we’ll deliver that to the sales team. They’ll use it, put it in their emails, and offer it to their prospects. If we get feedback that it isn’t quite working — we’re not getting email replies, people aren’t really interested, or they’re not actually reading it — then we know we need to correct that issue. So, say there’s an issue with a title, we can adjust it for the next time.
We’re basically doing A/B testing based on the feedback we’re getting from sales.
Enablement — The secret sauce of ABM:
David: Tech adoption can be a huge issue in organizations. People have a lot of competing priorities and it can be hard to enable them. You can’t just buy a program, put it in place, and not make sure that people are using it. That’s when things are going to fail. You’ve got to focus on enablement.
You can have a mediocre program — but if you have a stellar enablement program, you’ll succeed. If can enable your sales team to just 60 or 70%, you’re definitely going to see success.
Enabling the sales team to do their job well, that is the secret sauce to ABM.
