Here at Triggerfish we strive to help companies form a Marketing Operations mindset.
This means moving away from a project-driven or “set it and forget it” way of thinking and evolving your marketing function to operate on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
Your MarTech will never be “done”, so instead of reaching for the holy grail end result, think about identifying the right things to work on and making incremental progress over time.
To help organisations start thinking operationally with respect to their marketing function, or help them build a marketing operations team, we have created this 12-part blog series. We will be covering everything from Sales & Marketing alignment, growth marketing, digital strategy, creating ROI, cross-functional teams, and much more!
Today, Sales & Marketing Alignment
Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin. Fundamentally, the work that we're doing in marketing is all about selling. It's about writing good content that has context, and having an understanding of market insights. This knowledge and insight is provided to salespeople so they can engage customers in an effective way. Sales and marketing alignment is a must-do and must-have, because all successful businesses need to have good sales.
When dealing with B2B organisations, sales cycles can take a long time, and customers can be very choosy. Salespeople can’t spend a lot of time generating leads in this environment because a relatively small amount of them will ever convert. Instead, it makes sense for marketing to qualify leads and educate customers so that salespeople can focus most of their effort on prospects with the highest potential.
Marketing and Sales alignments starts with aligning tools
Much of the work we do at Triggerfish involves connecting marketing and sales tools together in order to create automated workflows with the aim of driving the top part of the funnel. Once we’ve used our marketing tools to convert prospects into leads, we drive them into our sales tools so that the salespeople can work their magic.
From the way that people interact with our marketing efforts, we can then create a blueprint for how our salespeople should interact with them in turn. This is one of the most important reasons why marketing and sales should be on the same page.
Fundamentally, the whole point of driving a regular cadence and insight of how customers work, is to provide better insight into how the market or service is delivered through marketing. Also then, how we can convert the market demand for our products and service through sales.
All businesses need Sales to survive
Without sales, there is no business – so marketing cannot afford to be hands-off with sales. At Triggerfish, we have hearty debates between sales and marketing, and we try to foster productive discussions. Although sales and marketing have cultural differences between departments, they get along much better once they start realising that it's all about the same process.
In order to guide this realisation, we emphasise the fact that understanding customer insights helps both sellers and marketers to look at the customer instead of looking at themselves. No matter the differences between sales and marketing, everyone is interested in the customer.
Here at Triggerfish, we strive to provide companies with a best-in-class experience that can supercharge marketing efforts and realign them towards business goals. If you’d like to learn more about how we helped Hastings Deering create an operational rhythm with marketing and technology - read our case study.