Scaling your ABM: 3 Sales and Marketing alignment challenges
Aligning your Sales and marketing teams is key to a successful ABM campaign and vital when scaling ABM campaigns across your organisation and through the tech channel. The main challenges companies experience when trying to align their sales and marketing teams for scaling ABM are centred around: Communication, Process and Measurement.
Communication
Sales and Marketing teams are often disparate; they have different methods and lines of communication, different routes to internal stakeholders and ever different physical locations. Due to this separation, your teams will not seem themselves as working together and instead feel as though they are two streams feeding the same pond. In order to get the best from your teams and scale your ABM activities you need to unite communications so these teams work as a powerful river carving out a new, joint, path.
Process
Your sales and marketing teams have such different processes that the teams and their leaders don’t believe they can work together. These teams need unified process in order to work together. In order to achieve alignment your teams need to see how they individual activities feed one another to create a unified experience for the customer. When processes are implemented within the organisation these should be considered from the customers viewpoint, from the initial marketing messages all the way through the delivery and payment. When this experience is clear within your organisation both your sales and marketing teams can see how their activities work together, unifying your disparate teams under a joint customer experience process.
Measurement
One of the key challenges most organisations experience when trying to align their sales and marketing teams for scaling ABM is measuring success. One team’s success is measured on sales won, the others is measured on the leads generated and often we play the ‘blame game’ when targets are not being met; both team blaming the other, rather than tackling the issue together and coming up with a mutually beneficial strategy. To counter this, joint measurements need to be in place. Unified goals and measurements will enable your Sales and Marketing teams to work together and deliver a successful ABM campaign.
Aligning your Sales and Marketing teams is difficult and required commitment from all parties involved yet, without it you cannot successfully run and scale your ABM campaigns . We have summarised 8 key steps for aligning sales and marketing for ABM success. For the extended infographic, click here.
- Planning - Unifying your teams goals and activities to ensure they are singing from the same song sheet.
- Data - Share data in a central CRM to share insights and identify pre-engaged prospects.
- Messaging - Ensure there is consistent messaging in all marketing and sales communications to create the best possible customer experience.
- Engagement - Engage with prospects throughout their buying journey with multiple touch points across multiple platforms
- Personalisation - Personalise all communication with prospects to their challenges, using the shared data in your central CRM.
- Optimisation - Use sales insights to optimise your ABM campaign throughout. Conversations with your sales team is your best source of information on prospects challenges.
- Human Touch - BDRs should have material, data and training to facilitate their conversations with prospects, allowing them to reach out any time. Find out more in our eBook - The case of the Broken Buyers' Journey
- Measurement - Have transparent reporting. ABM requires a significant investment and so the results need to be measured and reported on so all invested parties can understand the campaign progress.
Download our infographic to delve deeper into these 8 steps.
If you would like to discuss how Sherpa can transform your marketing, please get in touch…
- via email on letschat@sherpamarketing.co.uk
- by giving us a call on 01234 964000.
- or by clicking here.
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