Keeping your marketing and lead management goals on the same page is no small feat. In fact, aligning sales and marketing can be one of the biggest challenges for any business. While a CRM enhances your marketing strategy as well as your sales processes and even your customer service approach, there are still a few things that need to happen before marketing and lead generation goals can be fully aligned.
In this mini guide, we share some tips on how to ensure that your marketing and lead management goals are properly aligned.
Aligning Marketing and Lead Management
Some of the steps to consider for both marketing and lead management goals to be set for success include the following:
Define your mutual goal
First, you will need to determine your shared goal. This could be bringing in new customers, nurturing current leads, up-selling or cross-selling, customer retention or even something unique to your business. Both sales and marketing teams need to be fully aware of this shared goal before you can proceed.
Define your leads
Next, you will need to clarify how leads will be defined. This can be done by making a list of agreed definitions and criteria, along with points for lead scoring. When you have a clearly defined process, along with a list of scored leads, it will be a lot easier to proceed to the next step.
Define a common KPI
From here, you can define at least one KPI that both marketing and sales team require for lead generation to be successful. Although you can also have individual goals that work together, it is always good to have one shared performance indicator, such as x number of acquired leads in x months.
Define the lead process
By now, it will already be easier to move to the lead process. How will leads be captured? How will they be registered? How will they be nurtured, scored, qualified and handed over? One way to simplify this step is to create a flowchart that indicates the lead cycle as leads move from marketing to sales. For more tips, view our tips on how to align marketing and sales strategy with a CRM.
Finally, you will be able to outline expectations and responsibilities for both teams before you hand over. Once this is achieved, you should find that your lead management goals are far more aligned than they were before you got started.
