As we hurtle toward 2019, you’re likely evaluating your team’s successes over the past year. Hopefully, you can point directly to ways in which Marketing helped to grow revenue for your company. Are you ready to ramp up those efforts over the next 12 (or 13) months?
Here are our top 3 tips for helping to drive revenue—and prove your value to the organization—in 2019.
Focus: Talk About Customers’ Pain
As I’ve mentioned many times in the Refactored blog space, Marketing’s main goal is to help Sales drive revenue. That teamwork has to start with a conversation between Marketing and Sales.
The topic? Ideally, it will be your customers: their needs, their pains, and how your solution can help them achieve their business goals. If we can focus our collaboration on customers and their goals, Marketing can better tailor content and messaging to support the sales process.
Have you developed buying personas and a map of the information those personas crave across their buying journey? If not, now’s the time to add it to your must-do list. This type of work really should involve customer interviews, but barring that, Sales usually has the best insight into customers’ pains. And if you’re implementing an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy, it’s even more important for Marketing and Sales to team up to determine customers’ priorities.
Once you know what customers need most, you can better connect those needs with your organization’s unique value proposition. What do you provide better than anyone else—and how does that unique value help customers meet their defined goals?
Alignment: Schedule More Meetings (No, Really)
Next up: regular account reviews. Yes, everyone hates a meeting, but they’re absolutely vital in this case. Especially if you’re running an ABM program.
Set up weekly (or at least biweekly) planning reviews to coordinate optimal engagement efforts as part of your ABM strategy. During these meetings, you’ll want to review the current status of your ABM efforts and plan next steps for creating deep engagement with target accounts.
A sample agenda for an account-planning meeting might look like this:
Review recent engagement on the website, live or online events, phone calls, email open and click rates, chat sessions, and other activities.
Look at what’s been done since the last review meeting based on the developed account plan.
Ask what additional campaigns might serve to help your target accounts engage better.
Map out a plan to execute before the next session and hold everyone accountable for deliverables.
You should walk away with your marketing and sales teams 100% synced on how the campaigns are progressing and how best to elevate your game with your target accounts. Plus, you get a jump start on our final tip: raising your visibility with Sales and management.
Outreach: Raise Your Visibility
Everyone on your team wants to be viewed as a valuable resource. With budgets continually tightening, Marketing needs to do a little self-promotion.
Tracking and reporting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is an important part of this process. Consider using those measurements in a weekly or monthly activity report. Distribute this report to Sales (and potentially senior management). These reports might create a bit of extra work but will be worth it in the long run. Let Sales know—
What aspects of the account plan you’ve executed on
What campaign efforts are coming up
How they can support the campaigns
Specific metrics that show how completed or in-process campaigns are performing
This kind of honest reporting will serve to elevate marketing’s visibility across the organization and position the team as a valuable partner to sales.
If your results show less-than-spectacular results, don’t worry. Win some and learn some. Just be sure to include details about how what your team is doing to mitigate any issues and drive success going forward.
In fact, including a full picture of your efforts and their results—good and bad—helps to grow trust between Marketing and Sales and elevate your team’s reputation throughout your organization.
Show Your True Value
Marketing has always been the unifying force that brings Sales and customers together. As organizations increasingly require Marketing to document their contributions to revenue, forming more productive collaborative relationships with Sales is essential for the success of both teams.
Use these tips to create a strong sales enablement strategy, and in the coming year, you’ll see that alignment bear fruit as you meet or exceed your revenue targets.
Need an Ice Breaker?
Creating the kind of alignment required to support increasingly personalized marketing campaigns and sales processes isn’t always something that comes naturally. Fortunately, we get it.
Let’s explore how to build alignment—and your revenue engine. Contact Refactored.