The Modern Revenue Team: Aligning Marketing Automation & Sales Enablement Systems

As the trend moves towards merging sales and marketing teams within companies to build revenue powerhouses, the alignment of sales and marketing systems takes on a new level of importance. Let’s break it down. Historically, the relationship between sales and marketing has been disjointed and distant, often resulting in unrealized goals and finger-pointing. While some of the disconnects can be attributed to cultural differences, part of the misalignment has been the result of siloed processes, systems, and data. 

In the past, sales teams have mostly relied on CRM applications, with a more recent addition of sales enablement platforms to better manage and accelerate the sales process. Across the office, marketing teams have operated completely independently in marketing automation systems and a wide range of other ancillary mar-tech offerings. Not anymore. That’s where the revenue team’s newest strategy comes into play. 

By automating the entire customer journey, data integration tools create synergy and empower sales enablement platforms to help users win by getting the right information in and out in real-time. Professionals who want to merge marketing automation systems like Marketo with the sales software tools that they use every day, such as SalesLoft, will appreciate how Vertify gives them the power to sync and continually clean all of their data. Workflow management is only as good as the data that is in the system, and all are critical to the modern approach to growing revenue.

Foster Sales and Marketing Alignment Through Data

Connecting sales enablement tools directly to marketing automation offers several benefits, the first of which fosters alignment of sales and marketing teams towards a common goal – to make money and grow the revenue stream. This is done by allowing each team to focus on what they do best and work to their strengths. 

Marketing teams should control the one-to-many message, while sales focuses on the targeted one-to-one connection. A marketing-driven, sales-approved message will encourage teamwork internally and streamline outreach externally. It makes sense that working together towards a common goal helps to avoid conflict and leads to more effective, synergistic communications. 

According to Derek Grant, SVP of Commercial Sales at SalesLoft, “There’s this traditional disconnect that happens between the two arms of the organization. What’s really important is to get everyone under the same tent — everyone needs to align on goals and be accountable to those goals. You want both sides to be really clear on what they’re doing. Sales is super measurable and marketing is, too. Sometimes you’re just measuring in different directions and that’s bad for revenue, in general.”

Accelerate and Improve the Sales Process Steps

The second advantage of linking sales and marketing systems is the acceleration of the sales process by using lead scoring and routing rules to ensure that qualified leads are automatically passed over to sales quickly and efficiently. This guarantees that nothing gets overlooked and, ultimately, no lead is left behind. The end result is measurable and provides the best possible experience to the customer.

With speedy processing times, platforms can quickly filter out viable leads and prioritize leads that match the ideal customer profile (ICP). By utilizing smart routing rules, you avoid a blanket approach to outreach and, instead, warm prospects are primed and ready to hear the sales message. After all, you only get one chance to make a good first impression. With targeted and effective communication, there’s no doubt that you will have more engaged and responsive customers. 

This process is important for both outbound and inbound marketing. As for outbound marketing, let’s assume that your marketing team builds automated lead nurturing programs in Marketo where prospects receive content-focused emails. Using Marketo’s “Interesting Moments” along with “Sales Insights” features, you can score prospects based on their engagement level. Then once prospects reach a certain threshold indicative of accelerating engagement, they can be passed directly into an SDR or Account Exec’s SalesLoft ‘Follow’ cadence.

On the flip side, inbound leads can be prioritized and routed based on the call-to-action. For example, a lead from a pay-per-click (PPC) ad fills out a webform requesting a demo, pricing, or other details which suggests that they could be in-market and evaluating solutions. These leads should have the highest priority and will be pushed into a SDR or sales representative’s ‘High Priority’ cadence. Another likely inbound scenario is that a lead fills out a form and downloads a white paper, benchmark, or other authoritative content which indicates some warm interest, but they may not necessarily be in-market. These leads still need to be followed up with, although they are considered medium priority. As you can see, automation rules can dictate lead priority and  classify the type of outreach needed.

Win Together

Ultimately, systems from each side of the house are critical to the modern tech stack. By allowing both marketing and sales teams to nurture prospects, maintain relationships, and align their systems, companies operate under an intelligent approach to revenue generation. The right automation and workflow mean that the information lands in the right hands and leads can be engaged quickly. With the right team, the right data philosophy, and the right intelligence, revenue teams can win together.

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About Vertify

Vertify is transforming the way revenue teams work and win. With Vertify, every revenue team has the ability to tap into the benefits of robust data integrations to connect mission-critical revenue apps and data assurance to continually clean, normalize, and enrich customer and prospect data. By sitting at the intersection of automated data connection and quality, Vertify further empowers revenue teams to harness predictive intelligence that accelerates growth.

To learn more,  read our 5 Best Practices for Data Cleaning or visit our about page.