MSO: Closing the Marketing and Sales Gap
It can sometimes seem as if the sales and marketing teams of an enterprise are mortal enemies. 1 out of 4 companies state that their sales and marketing teams are rarely or never aligned. 50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive leads or poor prospects, for instance.
Lack of cooperation regularly costs businesses an average of 10% of revenue loss, annually. It also causes animosity and lack of unity in an organization, when cooperation and teamwork are key.
Closing the sales and marketing gap is integral in getting everyone on the same page. It can also benefit your business in other ways, like breaking valuable data out of its siloes to benefit the entire enterprise.
We're going to look at some ways that marketing orchestration can benefit your business as well as how it can be implemented in your business.
How Marketing Orchestration Can Help Save The Sales and Marketing Gap
Both sales and marketing are more intricate and complicated than ever before. Let's start by looking at what exactly marketing orchestration is, before diving into how it can be integrated into your business.
What Is Marketing Orchestration?
The days of one-off marketing campaigns are long gone. So are the days of sales and marketing acting as their own individual islands.
Sales and marketing are more interwoven and intertwined than ever before. When working together, they form a powerful feedback loop of continual refinement and business insights.
Marketing orchestration is the process of getting the sales and marketing departments working together. Let's look at a few ways that can be achieved.
Benefits Of Marketing Orchestration
Digital marketing has made the buyer's journey longer and more intricate than any other time in history. Customers have endless options and opportunities at their fingertips, 24 hours a day, and they know it. They also have access to encyclopedias of information on any conceivable subject, and they know how to use it.
Marketing orchestration helps to shorten the buyer's cycle by guiding the customer through the steps efficiently and expediently. It also helps to increase conversions and ROI by focusing on actual leads and sales, rather than empty engagement around unnecessary metrics.
Marketing orchestration focuses on the human rather than the numbers. For all of its strengths, marketing automation simply can't react to some of the cues that marketing orchestration can. This is particularly important when it comes to large and important clients and accounts.
Marketing orchestration is very quickly becoming non-optional. Marketing orchestration is becoming mandatory for recognizing individuals across multiple channels.
Implementing Marketing Orchestration To Close The Sales and Marketing Gap
Imagine this scenario. You get an offer to download some free software. When you take them up on their offer, you're connected to the Sales Department.
The problem is that the salesperson you're connected to doesn't know anything about the software. It seems they weren't informed about the marketing team's actions.
At best, this makes a company look inept. At worst, you could lose potential customers. This means you're spending money to lose business.
This isn't even the worst-case scenario, unfortunately. Sometimes an uninterested customer will continue to receive offers and solicitations from the sales department. They didn't get the memo the lead had already been contacted.
What started as simply a missed opportunity has become a verbal and outspoken enemy of your business. You start to accumulate negative business reviews. They begin to spread bad press about your business every opportunity they get.
This scenario is one example of why it's so important for your sales and marketing department to communicate and cooperate.
Here are some steps you can take to integrate marketing orchestration to help get everyone on the same page.
Start By Segmenting
The first step in creating a marketing orchestration strategy is separating the important clients from standard customers. Important customers should include high-ticket accounts with the prospect of repeat business.
Marketing orchestration should focus on clients that need the human touch. Marketing automation can handle a lot of the other duties. These can include attracting new customers or furthering them through the buyer's cycle.
Annotate Everything
Once you've decided which clients to focus on, you should get all of their data into one central dashboard. Most CRM software worth its salt will have the option to integrate social media marketing, email campaigns, and other marketing outreach into one place.
You'll need to do this as you'll want to make sure you know if and when an important client's been contacted.
Examine Cross-Platform Insights
Now that you have the central dashboard set up, you should begin analyzing each platform for insights. Most businesses don't have the resources to proposition a prospective client. Even if you could, you run the risk of irritating them and ruining your lead.
Evaluate insights from every available platform to get a detailed picture of that customer's behavior. If they engage more with your messaging in the mornings, send sales emails before lunch. If they're interested in informational content, offer them a free ebook to guide them to the next stage of the buyer's journey.
This is one example of how marketing orchestration can create a robust multi-channel business plan.
Recognize Multi-Channel Cues
Multi-channel marketing is an essential source of rich data. Make sure to make the most of it. Customer interaction with a social media post could indicate they're ready to make a purchase, for instance.
Closing the sales and marketing gap requires everyone getting on the same page. Remember that the customers you're focusing on are a very high priority and worthy of the extra attention. Have your sales and marketing teams work together to create useful multi-channel content with unified goals.
Marketing orchestration is the way of the future. Data surrounds us every second of every day thanks to mobile technology. Our digital activities are becoming intertwined with our actual lives.
Marketing orchestration frees your data and brings it to life. It also helps everyone to work together so you feel like a team.
Looking For More Digital Marketing Solutions?
It's never been more important for a business to work together towards a common goal. With so much data from all over it's too easy for different segments to operate in the dark. This can end up doing more harm than good.
If you're ready to integrate marketing orchestration into your business and optimize your social media content for actionable insights, then sign up for Social Horsepower today to get your sales and marketing departments working together!
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