Industries often faces challenges in identifying qualified prospects. This has been occurring quite frequently in this competitive market and the main reason is the non-alignment of marketing and sales team. Typically industry feels somewhere marketing is cost center and sales are revenue source, but in reality both are complimentary factor. In order to have sufficient qualified opportunities in pipeline, content always remains the major critical factor. Content has several meanings in context, but in business it means how clearly the offerings and results of the offerings are highlighted and shared across industry. It is more important to pass on the information precisely and clearly, rather than focusing on the source of shared information.
Sales always tries to pull people from masses through intelligence and research. At time business does business through pure intelligence, but the cost to derive the results in such cases always remains high. Thus, it is extremely important to follow a push strategy first, where marketing comes into picture. It is now where content brings in advantage over the entire game. Marketing constantly does research on several industry key takes, sales people being interacting at personal level brings a real good blend of experience and stories. Thus, the fusion of information between the research of marketing and information acquired by sales professionals helps in defining micro-level roadmap to push information and thereby pulling business interest to generate qualified lead. However, defining roadmap for customer acquisition through push and pull strategy. it is important to develop cohesive content marketing strategy:
- Clear definition of customer – Customer can be anyone, who so ever looks or peep into the offerings. But real customer will be someone who has been visiting the offerings and the provider is aware of the solutions like to overcome challenges. Such helps to bring more clarity from customer definition point and prevents attention from being diverted to those who does not qualify in the customer definition.
- Value proposition – With global competitive business, for any service provider it is important to clearly define what value they bring on the table for prospect. Value proposition can be clearly communicated only when organizational values and values associated with offerings are clearly mapped.
- Hand in hand with sales – Both marketing and sales has intelligence but the level of intelligence will certainly vary. As marketing team will define intelligence based on data collected through sources and sales people will have intelligence based on the discussions they have with the actual business people. Fusion of these two kind of information will give cutting-edge benefit in terms of defining content
- Stay flexible – Agile, I guess will be the right word to define. Business in 21st century is not constant, so it is important to be flexible. Business scenario and pain changes very frequently and so are the needs.
The above contents once defined by the marketing will results in push strategy through content. The content is the push factor and pull remains the results which means, here it would be the leads or opportunities who would enquire with the business. From sales point of view it is important to reduce the time to hunt for lead and convert the same into an opportunity. But at the same time, it is practically difficult. Thus, marketing absorbs some part of it and help sales folks to cut down their time on converting a lead to prospect and sales can focus on pure qualified opportunity and converting them into client.
While we discuss such the above points, it is equally important for businesses to derive the analytics behind. Honestly, every single minute in business has certain USD and if we check the overall cycle usually the sales & pre sales cycle consumes 10-15% of the total contract value. Which for most industries is extremely difficult to manage. However, with the collaborative approach between sales and marketing such overheads can be down by at least 8-12%, this is due to the heavy intelligence which both the team brings together on the table and thereby resulting in pull factor from mass. The alignment of marketing and sales has to happen from top level and that is what precisely even the best marketing professionals’ claims and its 100% genuine that the approach has to be top down. It is not about only having the pie it is all about how we expand the pie.
