Integrate Your Sales and Marketing Processes to Buzz Past Your Competitors

Imagine the following scenario: After coming back from the annual review, you feel great because you have just achieved your annual goal by a good margin.

Nobody knows yet, but by looking at your sales and marketing KPIs, you feel confident that you will comfortably reach next year’s goal as well.

But the numbers have also revealed a bottleneck. They tell you that by investing an additional resource in one of your integrated sales and marketing team’s processes, you will not only achieve next year’s target, but absolutely smash it and make the investors very happy. You immediately start planning for a new recruit.

In this blog post, we will show you how the Unified Business Model for Sales and Marketing Alignment will allow you to reach this scenario. Read more to find out how.

Why integrating your sales and marketing processes will let you run past your competitors

I remember reading about an interesting incident from Inbound 2013.

One of the keynote speakers introduced himself as being a sales expert. Immediately, over half the participants walked off.

When asked later, the participants said that they left because a keynote about sales wasn’t interesting for them as marketers.

But isn’t it a marketer’s job to turn strangers into customers? And how can they do so if they know nothing about sales?

Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Methodology - turn strangers into customers

As illustrated by the above story, most marketers are resistant to selling. That’s why setting up a great co-operation between your marketing and sales teams will let you buzz past most of your competitors.

A model that shows how you can integrate your sales and marketing processes

The Unified Business Model for Sales and Marketing Alignment shows you exactly how your fully integrated sales and marketing organization could work:

The three colours blue, pink and brown represent its three Sub-Processes:

1. The Outbound Sales Sub-Process: Based on Aaron Ross model described in his book Predictable Revenue. We have used it in multiple businesses with fantastic results.
2. The Inbound Marketing Sub-Process: Based on Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing Methodology. But it also adds a couple of crucial steps: How a Marketing Lead is ascended into a Sales Lead, with inspiration from Digital Marketer’s program The Email Marketing Machine. This is the connection from marketing to sales.
3. The Nurturing Sub-Process: Based on various industry best practices and our own adaptations based on customer experiences. This is the connection from sales to marketing.

The specialized roles in the model allows your integrated sales and marketing team to play like a soccer team of defenders, midfielders and attackers who pass the ball until a scoring opportunity is created.

Avoid the mistake most organizations make when integrating their sales and marketing processes

Integrating your sales and marketing processes is not very difficult compared to many other common organizational changes, if you know how.

View this model as a long-term roadmap and implement one sub-process (or even part of a sub-process) at a time. Each implementation, no matter how small, should finance itself with increased ROI and measurability.

This allows you to create buy-in for each step at a time and prove ROI quickly, allowing you to move to the next step. Also, the model will look somewhat different for each organization, so it is important that you can learn from each step you implement.

Your turn

Now you have seen the full picture, but it is time to delve into the details of each sub-process.

We will go through each such sub-process in this sales and marketing alignment guide series of blog posts. We will start by delving into how to create a structured outbound sales process in the next blog post, which is important to understand for both sales and marketing managers.