How to Align Sales and Marketing Teams around Revenue Growth

By Casey Cheshire, Founder of Cheshire Impact

We all know that when sales and marketing teams are aligned around the common goal of revenue growth, they are able to act as a cohesive unit and work in lock-step. But for many B2B sales and marketing teams, this dream isn’t a reality.

So what’s a B2B marketer on a quest for sales and marketing alignment to do?

Along with the adoption of a collaborative revenue optimisation process and strategy, marketing and sales alignment often includes the leveraging of marketing automation and sales enablement technology. For marketing teams already using Pardot, Salesforce Engage helps you empower your sales teams to be efficient, on-brand, and customer focused during the entire buyer journey.

At Cheshire Impact, we like to give the following advice to sales and marketing teams looking to get the most out of Engage.

Use Engage Campaigns to Send Quick, Check-in Emails to Leads 

The primary purpose of Engage Campaigns is to empower sales to send personalised and tracked emails to their leads and contacts. Engage campaign emails can be crafted from available 1:1 email templates or created and sent ad-hoc. They can be sent one-off to individual leads or in small batches to leads owned by a sales user.

Here are a few examples of emails suitable for sending using Salesforce Engage:

1. Quick, personalised emails for relationship development
“I was just thinking about our last conversation…”
“I saw this blog post and thought you would appreciate it…”
“This new article/white paper/blog post reminded me of what you said about __…”

2. A brief note to leads in a specific region or industry to let them know about an upcoming trip, event or trade show
“I wanted to let you know I’ll be in ___ next week, want to grab lunch?…”
“I hope to see you at the ___ trade show next month; I’ll be there!…”
“Any chance you’re planning on going to the ___ event next quarter?…”

3. A quick note to follow up after a webinar or event
“I noticed you attended our latest webinar! I’d love to connect and hear what you thought…”
“It was great catching up last week at the ___ trade show. Let me know of a good day next week for us to connect…”
“I noticed you weren’t able to attend yesterday’s event. Do you have any availability to connect later this week?”

Pro-tip: Whenever possible, include links in Engage emails so you can observe and track engagement with your emails using Engage Reports. For link clicks to be tracked by the system, all links will be automatically re-written, so be sure to hide your links behind the text.

Marketing Teams: Don’t Be Afraid to Dive Right In 

For some marketing teams, it can be intimidating to take that first step towards enabling your sales reps with marketing automation. But providing sales with a library of marketing-approved email templates allows you to:

1. Maintain and enforce brand standards (after all, the alternative often means sending untracked ‘rogue’ emails directly from Outlook)
2. Enable sales reps to re-engage cold leads and keep them from falling through the cracks
3. Align sales and marketing and work seamlessly to achieve a common goal — finding solutions for customers that lead to revenue

And allowing sales to send quick one-off or small batch emails to their leads from Salesforce Engage frees up time for the marketing department to focus on producing fresh content and executing complex campaigns.

Don’t delay getting sales and marketing trained and aligned on using Salesforce Engage. It becomes a powerful tool for every organisation looking to optimise their funnel and increase revenue.

 
If you’re interested to know how you can implement Salesforce Engage in your business, email us at asklava@lavaprotocols.com or call us at 03-7885 9720.

 
Article first appeared on the Salesforce Pardot blog.

Lava is an authorised Salesforce Partner in Malaysia and has more than a decade of experience in cloud solutions which includes marketing automation, CRM implementation, change management, and consultation. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level.