Unified Business Model: The Complete Model for Sales and Marketing Alignment

There are plenty of reasons why you should align your sales and marketing teams. But how does that alignment look and work? And how do you get there?

After reading this blog post, you will know exactly how a fully aligned sales and marketing organization works and be able to start implementing it in your own organization.

A summary of the Unified Business Model™ for Sales and Marketing Alignment

The Unified Business Model has been developed based well-known sales and marketing best practices and customer projects over the past several years. It helps organizations align their sales and marketing organization and processes, and establish clear, measurable sales and marketing KPIs.

By understanding it, you will have a clear view on how a fully integrated sales and marketing organization looks and which processes align the two functions:

Each part of the model will be fully explained in upcoming blog posts. But in short, it consists of three dimensions:

1. The organization (the distinct roles)
2. The process (how the roles interact with each other)
3. The KPIs (how to measure the interactions and continuously improve)

The process (dimension 2) consists of three sub-processes:

1. Outbound Sales for Proactivity (Unknown → Prospect → Sales Lead → Customer)
2. Inbound Marketing for Mass Appeal (Unknown → Visitor → Marketing Lead → Sales Lead)
3. Lead Nurturing for Leverage (Prospect/Sales Lead/Marketing Lead → Nurturing Lead → Marketing Lead)

Click the links if you’re interested in one of the specific dimensions or sub-processes. Otherwise, simply continue reading until the end, and we’ll guide you through all of them in order. Let’s look at how this model can be applied in a real-life situation.

What the UBM™ Sales and Marketing Alignment Model can do for you

Let us paint a scenario.

I’m imagining your company has a really cool solution. But I think you are probably facing large competitors. Perhaps you are not 100% sure how to cut through the clutter with your message. How can you get found and compete against the giants?

Inbound Marketing is probably the best solution right now. So you start implementing the UBM Inbound Marketing Sub-Process.

Create mass appeal using Inbound Marketing

You brainstorm what your buyer personas might search for online in different stages of their buyer’s journey. Based on this, you and your team agree on a set of keywords to target.

In order to increase traffic, you start blogging around those keywords. It takes a couple of months, but you start seeing some surprising results. People actually do find your content and download your targeted guides and whitepapers. Your sales people start getting more and more inbound leads.

But this creates a new problem. Rather than closing opportunities, your sales reps get distracted by interesting but ultimately unqualified leads. Things start fall between the chairs, and customers aren’t followed up properly. Because your sales reps are trying to handle all leads, they only have time to create sub-par presentations. Sales results are hurting.

You decide to battle this on two fronts:

First, you build Ascension Campaigns: Automated Email follow ups for each of your guides and whitepapers. Only leads that respond are sent to a rep.

Second, you work with your marketing and sales colleagues to define clear lead qualification criteria: By grading leads on decision making power, pain and fit, your reps are able to find the leads most likely to close. They spend an unproportionate amount of time researching and creating fantastic and customized presentations for them, and close rates skyrocket as a result.

But what about the leads that aren’t qualified or don’t respond to your ascension campaign? Enter the Nurturing Sub-Process.

Create leverage using Lead Nurturing

You need to nurture these leads with targeted weekly messages designed to progress them through the buyer’s journey. Once they become ready, they will bite on one of your Conversion Campaigns, and become Marketing Leads again.

Great, now you are taking care of all the leads who are not yet ready to buy.

But since you are only focusing on inbound, it is very difficult to control your own destiny. Your reps are dependent on leads coming in, and can’t control where the leads come from. What happened to your ability to proactively go out and grab specific market share in a targeted way? Enter outbound sales.

Control your destiny using Outbound Sales

You ask your salespeople to prospect and cold call, create great incentives to do so, and push them. But it just doesn’t happen. With leads coming in all the time and live opportunities to work on, motivation to go out and cold call is zero.

You decide to hire a Prospector and a Hunter.

The Prospector is an analytical-minded person who analyzes your CRM data and produces new calling campaigns, researches which companies to call, and finds contacts within those companies. Much of her work is made easier and more fun thanks to platforms which finds prospects and contacts for her and software that monitors her target accounts online.

The lists are sent to your new Hunter. Without having to spend time researching contacts to call and verifying against existing CRM records, he spends his time simply dialling. Thus, he reaches over 20 people and books 2 intro presentations per day for the closers.

The Hunter finds that most people find your solution interesting but aren’t yet ready to see a presentation. No problem - with a click of a button, the hunter sends the lead into a personalized, segmented email campaign. The lead then gets a series of personalized emails that look like they are sent from the Hunter who called them. The emails deliver some additional information and check in from time to time to see if the leads are ready to have a follow up meeting. When a lead clicks a link in one of the emails, the Hunter is notified and gives the lead another call. If the leads don't click on any of the follow up emails, they are sent to the generic Nurturing bucket and receive your weekly newsletters. Your Hunter feels comfortable knowing that the leads that are ready will re-convert on one of your monthly Conversion Campaigns. Because of the automation, your Hunter can juggle ten times times as many leads as before. As a result, the number of booked meetings multiply.

Your closers, now getting meetings booked in their calendars both from inbound and outbound, get so much interaction volume with customers that they get an almost eerie sense of intuition about what customers’ pain points are, how to respond to various objections, and which buttons to push to help customers feel the value of your products. Their close rates triple, and with so many new qualified meetings booked, you smash all sales expectations.

But you know something they don’t. Since you measure the conversion rate between each step, you already knew you were going to overachieve. You also know exactly where in the process to invest to get the most bang for the buck. You decide to improve your outbound sales by hiring another Hunter and get more inbound leads by hiring another Campaign Manager. You are not surprised when you see the results exactly 6 months later: The length of your sales cycle. In fact, the results are almost exactly what you projected. The board is satisfied.

You feel confident as you present your growth plan to your CEO. Because you are able to provide accurate numbers of where the biggest bottlenecks are, investment needed, and ROI expected, you get the budget you need scale up your organization and take on your larger competitors.

Time to implement the Sales and Marketing Alignment Model™

This scenario illustrates how the Unified Business Model for Sales and Marketing Alignment can work in practice.

The next blog post will go into more detail about the organizational aspects of the model of integrating sales and marketing.

For a full list articles in the series, click here: Complete Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment.