 In order for any company to successfully improve its sales process, there needs to be a way to measure the effectiveness of specific sales and marketing efforts. Team members from both departments must also take ownership of the KPIs that directly relate to their roles. Of course, the first step is to determine which metrics are actually KPIs (or key performance indicators). There's certainly no shortage of metrics from which to choose! But identifying the ones that truly reflect the health and power of your sales process is a fundamental step toward measuring effectiveness — and ultimately making adjustments as needed. Let's dive into some of the more common sales and marketing metrics, see which department should take ownership of them, and also discuss ways you can keep all of your team members on the same page. Common Marketing KPIs Many marketing teams will use the following metrics as KPIs as they monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns:
Common Sales KPIs After a prospect moves past a certain point in the sales and marketing funnel, it's important for the marketing team to hand the prospect off to the sales team — which means the sales team will have an entirely different set of KPIs to quantify their effectiveness at converting leads and closing deals. Some KPIs your sales team may look at include:
Apart from the above metrics that focus on activities your sales team is expected to perform, it's also helpful to measure the makeup of and changes within your sales population (that is, the leads in your sales pipeline). The following metrics are helpful for this:
Keeping Sales & Marketing in Alignment The above metrics are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to potential KPIs. And we haven't even mentioned common high-level KPIs, like revenue, close rate, leads generated, cost per lead, or ROI. Nevertheless, the important thing is to make sure your KPIs are relevant to actual business success and that your sales and marketing teams understand which metrics they own. Setting up a KPI scorecard is only half the battle — it's vital that team members understand their role in the overall sales process and which KPIs they will be held accountable for. Whenever you first institute an integrated scorecard (and whenever you adjust it in the future) make sure that your expectations are clearly communicated to both teams (perhaps in a joint meeting). Keep the lines of communication open throughout any sales or marketing campaign. At the end of the day, identifying which metrics are actually KPIs for your company and communicating ownership expectations to each team will help you to accurately gauge the effectiveness of your efforts, and ultimately improve your company's sales performance. Learn More A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources.  If you were taking your family or friends on a road trip, you wouldn't just get in the car and start driving in a random direction. At the very least, you'd first agree on where you were going. Then, as the driver, it's your responsibility to plan your route and any stops along the way.
As a salesperson, you're a guide, helping your customer reach their desired outcome. So why not plan in advance the same way you would if you were any other type of guide? Khalil Benalioulhaj and Martin Holland invited Karl on their podcast, the Cash Flow Contractor, to talk about how Iceberg Selling helps you prepare to be the best guide you can be to your customers. To show someone how to reach a desired outcome, you first need to share a vision. Karl, Khalil, and Martin discuss how salespeople, and entrepreneurs working in a sales capacity, can co-create that vision with their customers and lay out the path from the starting point to that eventual outcome. This episode applies the principles of Iceberg Selling to the construction industry and its unique set of challenges. So, how can exploring the 90% below the surface apply to services like commercial and residential building or remodels? Watch the interview on YouTube or visit their website for links to your favorite podcast platforms.  All companies want to be more successful — whether that means bringing in more revenue, being more efficient, or both. A common thread that's interwoven through all successful sales and marketing operations is careful data tracking and evaluation. It's especially important when assessing digital marketing strategies. This kind of tracking is accomplished most effectively with an integrated scorecard. What is an integrated scorecard? It's a scoring system that includes data points from all metrics in the buyer's journey, including both traditional marketing data and CRM data that the sales team can see. Simply put, an integrated scorecard is a way to track what's working and what's not on both sides of the aisle: marketing and sales. How To Set Up an Integrated Scorecard The highest-performing sales and marketing companies assign specific owners and targets to each section of the integrated scorecard. They also set up target numbers to contextualize each section. For instance, if a student receives 155 points on a test, that's a great score if 175 points is the maximum they could receive. But what if the maximum score is 3000 points? Not so much. In the same way, 155 marketing emails opened may or may not be a good "score," depending on the total amount of emails sent out. The good news is that with modern automation software and CRMs, it's become much easier to track such specific metrics. Sales and marketing data can now be driven by detailed information about customer interactions at each stage of the buyer's journey, and each stage (and sub-stage) of the sales and marketing funnel can now be assigned to specific team members, who will take ownership of the results. Where Does the Scorecard Data Come From? The majority of the data used in an integrated scorecard originates from a few key data points. The most critical sources often include:
If you set up your automations to send data directly into your integrated scorecard, with a minimum of manual data entry required, these reporting tools can work wonders for your data collection and tracking. If you're not sure how best to set up that kind of workflow, keep in mind that there are tech tools on the market (like Easy Insights) that can aggregate data from multiple sources and present the information in a single, easy-to-read dashboard. As a result, you can see all your digital marketing metrics in one place. The Importance of Well-Monitored Data Well-monitored (and well-understood) data can supercharge your digital marketing performance, enabling you to make agile, data-driven decisions that improve your results. It can also reveal critical errors that would not be readily apparent otherwise. For example, imagine that you're running a Google Ads campaign to send traffic to your website. Your marketing team carefully examined search traffic data and competitors' landing pages and collaborated with your sales team to form a keyword-based strategy. Then, the keywords were coordinated across the ads and the landing page to which the ads led. Everything was done "by the book." By the end of the first week, you see that 150 leads had clicked on your ads, and between 10-15% had clicked through to the Google submission form on your website landing page. So far, so good! But then you notice something odd: When website visitors reached your landing page, they weren't taking the next step and completing the contact form. In fact, not a single visitor submitted the form! With that data in hand, you decide to dig further... and you discover that the company that created your Google submission form on the website hadn't set up the permissions correctly. In other words, leads were unable to enter any of their information into the form. Once you identify the problem, you quickly take steps to correct it — and your leads start pouring in. Now, imagine the scenario above without well-monitored data. Would you have suspected a technical issue was the culprit, or would you have simply concluded that your marketing strategy was off-base? How long would it have taken you to identify the real issue? As you can see, careful data tracking and evaluation of digital marketing, made easier by an integrated scorecard, can save a ton of time and money when things go sideways. Judge Your Digital Marketing Efforts With an Integrated Scorecard Simply tracking how many leads enter your funnel and how many end up buying isn't enough to judge your digital marketing strategy's overall effectiveness. To make the most of carefully crafted marketing automations and a well-organized CRM, every team must have KPIs in their integrated scorecard — and each KPI must have a readily discernable purpose for being tracked. Some key questions your KPIs should answer include the following:
Answering questions like these and making any adjustments that are needed will help you progressively craft a winning sales and marketing strategy that delivers consistent results. Granted, it may take some work to set up an integrated scorecard for your business, direct the flow of sales and marketing data toward that scorecard, and get all of your team members on board with a new approach. But the rewards of doing so far outweigh the cost — and in the long run, you're virtually guaranteed to see improved sales performance as a result. Learn More A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources.  The third best practice of Iceberg Selling is to build rapport with customers, colleagues, or whoever you happen to be interacting with. While building rapport always includes showing authentic interest in the other person's "iceberg"—particularly the 90% that you can't see on the surface—it also includes sharing your iceberg with them, too.
Karl's interview on episode 181 of The Insight Interviews podcast, with Steve Scanlon, dives into the human qualities of iceberg selling. It particularly emphasizes the role of self-awareness in sales, explaining how understanding and addressing internal beliefs can drive significant improvements in performance. Shifting the focus from closing a transaction to deep, authentic connections leads to greater sales success. And, as Karl and Steve discuss, truly connecting with others begins with knowing yourself. One of the key takeaways from the podcast is how understanding the hidden psychological barriers that salespeople face can unlock new levels of success. Karl elaborates on the importance of embracing vulnerability in sales and how genuine human connections—rather than hard-selling tactics—can make all the difference. Whether you're in leadership or are a front-line sales representative, these insights will help you approach your sales process with more clarity, confidence, and connection. Karl and Steve also discuss how, for sales leaders, the iceberg selling approach provides a refreshing take on how to build a team that not only performs but thrives in a challenging environment. By shifting focus from sales quotas to personal growth and connection, sales organizations can foster a culture of sustainable revenue and growth. Listen to it here or on your favorite podcast platform.  For many in the corporate world, meetings have the reputation of being time-wasting, soul-crushing exercises in futility. However, when sales meetings are designed and presented correctly, few activities contribute more to collective creativity, collaboration, and organizational growth.
To be sure, it's important to find a balance between leaving space for the expression of ideas and providing clear guidance on the scope and purpose of the meeting. The key here is structure. Create a clear agenda that has buy-in from all key stakeholders. As a result, you'll be able to develop useful and efficient sales meetings. Here are some critical steps to take along this line: Step #1: Set Intentions. Create Connections. Setting intentions is exactly what it sounds like. Before each sales meeting, you need to make it clear to all participants what you hope to achieve through the meeting. Creating connections, however, is especially vital if you're beginning to bring your sales and marketing teams together via integrated meetings. It may be a good idea to use the first combined meeting with both departments as a sort of "brainstorming session." Open the meeting by having each participant share something about themselves. This could be a professional or personal win, someone they want to recognize or thank, or an icebreaker exercise that gets people excited and engaged in the meeting. This shouldn't take up too much time. However, it is an essential tool in making each person feel heard and valued. Then, proceed to get a consensus on what the partnership between sales and marketing should look like. Get your team members to share enough ideas that everyone starts to get excited about what the future could look like. Set the stage with this first meeting. Then, future integrated meetings can focus on ideas, initiatives, and actions through the lens of that original vision outlined by your team. Step #2: Remember Why You Are Meeting Hopefully, you've already made the point of the meeting clear long before it actually begins. But it never hurts to introduce a meeting by clearly stating the goals. This can be especially helpful if team members are used to participating in a certain type of meeting, but not necessarily the type you're currently holding. Whether it's sharing knowledge, creating accountability, or attacking a specific problem, make sure everyone knows what the objective is, and how you want them to participate. Step #3: Evaluate Where You Are Right Now There are, without fail, two key pieces of information you need for any successful journey: your desired destination and where you are now. We already alluded to the desired destination in step #1(and we'll discuss it more in step #4)... but what about your team's current state? How are sales and marketing collaborating? Is there still room for improvement? Which sales and marketing tactics are proving effective? And which ones aren't performing up to expectations? Where are the bottlenecks in the sales pipeline? You'll likely need to use a mixture of qualitative and quantitative information to arrive at an accurate analysis of your current situation. Again, this is why it's crucial to properly prepare any team members who will be attending. Enable them to show up with the data and anecdotal information to make the best use of everyone's time. Step #4: Align on Where You Want to Go Many corporate employees are used to weekly, rinse-repeat meetings where they can mostly tune out. But when every meeting is geared toward a particular outcome, things change quickly. At some point during the meeting, you need to explicitly name the problem, challenge, or initiative you have come together to solve. This should only be done after everyone has had a chance to provide their input — after all, your view of what the issue is may change during the course of a truly productive, collaborative meeting. Nevertheless, once the issue has been clearly defined, it allows everyone on the team to focus on solutions — both collectively and individually. It's important to note here that this doesn't just have to involve overarching business outcomes. It may be appropriate in some meetings to focus on more granular results. These include reducing the number of unqualified sales leads, clarifying marketing communication to increase customer satisfaction, and so forth. Step #5: Chart the Path Forward Once the team has been aligned on a desired outcome or destination, it's time to specify which solutions should be focused on, and come up with tactics to support those solutions. This may involve a standalone meeting — e.g., a strategy or working session. As the names suggest, strategy sessions are more focused on conceptual troubleshooting. Conversely, working sessions involve the nitty-gritty details that transform a strategy into an active business process. Step #6: Plan Next Steps and Create Accountability Every meeting should have clear next steps — including owners of those steps, requirements, and deadlines (or at least approximate timelines). Make sure all participants agree. Everyone should leave the meeting understanding what's expected of them. Don't leave anything vague! If you even get the slightest sense that an aspect of your plan might still be somewhat nebulous, or that a team member doesn't quite understand what they need to do, clarify, clarify, clarify until it can't get any clearer. Don't confuse insistence on clarity with micro-management. The latter is counterproductive and discouraging; the former is essential for the smooth operation of any business and leads to increased discipline and accountability among your team members. Step #7: Always Support Commitment With a Recap No one should ever leave a meeting, no matter how positive, thinking: "That's nice, but I doubt anything will come from it." It's important to remind your participants that it's everyone's responsibility to support the team and do what they have agreed to do. One of the most effective, yet simplest ways to do this is by providing each meeting participant with a recap after the meeting ends. This is often provided via email in the form of a brief summary along with a list of action items, and each item's owner. In-person recaps can also be effective. Supporting the team through solid recaps builds trust, collaboration, accountability, and good habits. (You may even find these good habits sneak into other meetings as well!) If you keep these seven key steps in mind as you design your meeting agendas, you'll undoubtedly find that your sessions become more productive, your teams become tighter and more focused, and your overall sales process becomes smoother and more efficient. Remember, you don't want your meetings to crush souls — instead, they should help your team crush their sales goals! Learn More A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources.  In a thought-provoking conversation on Chris McNeil’s podcast, Karl Becker shares transformative insights into selling as problem solving. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to improve their influence and connection, both professionally and personally.
Karl begins by exploring the power of building connections with others, drawing on his own experiences of adapting and connecting to create a sense of belonging. Whether in sales, leadership, or consulting, this ability to build meaningful connections lays the foundation for solving problems and driving success. Success doesn't always mean doing everything yourself. It means empowering others to contribute their best, too, whether that refers to your customers or your teammates. This mindset shift has profound implications for sales leaders and professionals alike. Karl emphasizes to Chris that every challenge, conversation, or opportunity is like an iceberg—90% lies beneath the surface. By embracing curiosity and seeking to understand what’s hidden below, sales professionals can uncover deeper motivations, address unmet needs, and create long-lasting value for their clients. The podcast also highlights the importance of co-creating solutions with clients. By engaging in authentic conversations and genuinely understanding their world, you move beyond transactional sales to establish trust and shared ownership of solutions—leading to stronger relationships and more natural outcomes. For anyone in sales, leadership, or influence, this episode is packed with actionable insights. Learn how to shift from a "close-first" mentality to a service-driven, long-term value mindset. Listen to the full interview on your favorite podcast platform or on the Thought Leadership Studio website.  Meetings are at the very core of sales and marketing integration. In fact, they are one of the most critical factors in orchestrating the type of cooperation that ultimately results in closed sales. In addition, they promote regular, meaningful communication between teams and departments, which helps to prevent disagreements and misalignments that can lead to conflict.
Well, that's how sales and marketing meetings are supposed to function. In the real world, many company sales meetings end up wasting everyone's time. Maybe they lack focus and structure; maybe they've become occasions for a team leader to dictate strategy behind a facade of "collaboration." Whatever the case may be, all too often meetings in the corporate world are counterproductive, frustrating, and exhausting. It doesn't have to be that way. You can develop, promote, and chair meetings that generate creative ideas, yield actionable results and promote genuine alignment and collaboration between your sales and marketing departments. But to hold an effective sales meeting, setting the appropriate tone must be at the top of your list of best practices. Approach Sales Meetings With a Spirit of "Teaming" The stereotypical corporate meeting involves a leader on one side who's rigidly following a series of bullet points, lecturing his or her audience about decisions that have already been made, and generally sucking all the air out of the room. Not surprisingly, on the other side you have disengaged, bored team members who clearly view the sales and marketing meeting as a hardship to be endured rather than an opportunity to be heard. If that describes your organizational sales meetings, even to a small degree, it's vital to initiate a company-wide mindset shift that will counter those bad habits. The shift should be toward "teaming" — in other words, cultivating a positive mindset and unifying around a shared goal. The most effective way to enter productive sales and marketing meetings is to remember that you are coming together to create results, not to dictate or be dictated to. Meetings should be spaces for team members to share observations and ideas, and even ask for support as they work to understand and fulfill their roles in the sales funnel. For instance, think of a marketing team that isn't sure of which direction to take a new piece of content. Perhaps in a meeting, one of the marketing managers asks the sales team for observations on what leads seem to be most interested in. That conversation could open up completely new angles for the marketing team to consider as they continue to develop and implement their content strategy. Key Tone-Setters for Effective Sales Meetings As you reflect on ways to prepare for effective sales and marketing meetings, there are some important principles you must keep in mind when it comes to setting the right tone. These include the following points: 1. Effective sales meetings must have structure. It's no secret that sales meetings without structure fail to accomplish their intended purpose — if, indeed, they have a clear purpose at all. Meetings, like sales and marketing initiatives, live and die by strategy, processes, and people. In other words: you need a strategy for how to run meetings in the first place; you need processes in place that make your meetings efficient and useful; and you need to make sure your people are contributing and receiving value at those meetings. 2. Sales and marketing meetings must have an agenda. Whatever form your sales meeting structure ends up taking, a clear agenda needs to be an integral part of it. It's crucial that whoever leads the meeting has an agenda already in place, and that any critical resources or key assignments are given to participating team members well in advance. When your team members have a few days to look at and think about the items on the agenda, they'll be in a much better position to share useful feedback and observations during the meeting itself. In fact, you may even want them to suggest additional items be included on the agenda — and if you ask them far enough in advance, you may be surprised at how much feedback you receive, and how valuable it is! 3. Successful sales meetings include logistical planning. The importance of creating a meeting environment that's conducive to collaboration and learning shouldn't be overlooked. Obviously, you'll want to hold your meeting at a time when everyone can pay attention, and at a location as free of distractions as possible. Moreover, for the sake of efficiency, it's helpful to have any meeting resources or hardware primed and ready to go. For example, you may want to ensure that whiteboards and markers are clean and new, or that any digital content you plan to share is preloaded and ready to play. 4. Effective sales meetings are selective (in terms of attendees). Don't just invite everyone to a meeting. Select your attendees according to who will really benefit from the information to be discussed, as well as who is in the best position to add value to the meeting. It's usually best to keep your meetings small: four to six people is typically a comfortable number. Additionally, you usually shouldn't invite more than eight people if you want full participation and engagement. 5. High value sales meetings encourage a collaborative headspace. A good meeting covers what the sales and marketing teams will co-create in the future — not the mistakes that one team or the other made in the past. Re-fighting past battles is useful to nobody. Make sure all meeting attendees understand that this is a time for forward-looking collaboration and construction, not for complaining or airing personal grievances. Everyone should approach the meeting ready to listen with genuine respect to the ideas presented by their fellow attendees. This is the only way meetings will become greater than the sum of their parts. If you incorporate these key "tone-setters" into your planning process, then you'll be in an excellent position to run an efficient, well-structured, valuable meeting. And even if your organization does require a significant mindset shift towards true collaboration, the effort to make that change is well worth the effort. Doing so can eventually result in sales and marketing meetings that yield actionable results — and in turn, those actionable results can lead to more closed sales and higher profits for your business. Look out for next month’s blog, which will focus on creating an effective meeting agenda. Learn More About Hosting Successful Sales Meetings A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in a new book called Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources. In sales, demonstrating love is about going the extra mile to connect with someone—and even to connect with your own purpose.
In this interview, Karl and Selling With Love podcast host Jason Marc Campbell talk about how love figures into the principle of Iceberg Selling. That includes more than just being considerate of what's going on below the surface in another person's life. It means showing yourself some love, too. It's easy for a salesperson to get discouraged. There's a lot of head trash involved brought on by TV, movies, and people we meet in the real world (including sometimes the people we love). Seeing the value in what you do, and how you bring that value to your relationships with customers, and everyone else in your life, can go a long way to help you connect with your "why." Check out the video above, or visit the Selling With Love website or your favorite podcast platform. Karl Becker on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Podcast: DiscussingThe Secrets to Lifetime Value Sales11/21/2024
 Karl appeared on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur with Jim James to talk about how shifting your mindset can help you to take charge of your own success. This interview especially digs into the lifetime value mindset—where you play not for an immediate transaction, but for a lifelong relationship with your customer.
How does taking on a lifetime value mindset affect the way you sell? How does it help you get out of the "check-in zone", where you're repeatedly checking in with a lead to see if they're ready to buy? How can it help you dig yourself out of sales ruts? Using the principles of Iceberg Selling, you can dive below the surface of the symptoms that hold you back. You can understand root causes and discover the paths to success both in your business and your day-to-day life. Find the full show on YouTube or on your favorite podcast platform.   In a formal dinner, each guest often has a placemat under their plate and utensils when they sits down to eat. Most people don't give the placemat a second thought. However, it does serve a significant function: it prevents the table from getting stained with food or dented by silverware.
We've referred to the "sales placemat" in previous articles. Like a literal placemat, many organizations don't think much about this visual framework for streamlining the sales funnel. However, the sales placemat performs an important function in a growing business: it protects both the marketing and sales teams from accidentally damaging the company without realizing it. Before we talk about how and why that's the case, let's define what we mean by "sales placemat." What Exactly is a "Sales Placemat"? The sales placemat is just a visual way to represent the entirety of a company's sales funnel for a particular customer persona, along with the matching roles and procedures that help to accomplish business goals in each stage of the funnel. What a sales placemat may look like can be described as follows and is pictured below.
Of course, companies can customize their sales placemat according to their specific needs and circumstances. But the point is that each business should have some kind of placemat on hand to help organize and streamline their efforts. Develop a Sales Placemat Through Sales and Marketing Collaboration It goes without saying that the key to developing an effective sales placemat is collaboration between sales and marketing. There's no room for a "siloed mentality" here. There needs to be an open, running dialogue between key stakeholders on both teams on a variety of items, such as:
As you can see, there's a lot of room for discussion and a critical need for mutual agreement on key aspects of the sales placemat. With that in mind, it may be wise to schedule several meetings over the course of a few weeks (or even months) to hash out the details. Keep regular check-ins between sales and marketing leadership at the top of your (and their) agenda. Continue to be the champion for the sales placemat until it has fully developed into a workable version that both teams can use. The Benefits of the Sales Placemat for Sales and Marketing You don't have to look too far to discern some key advantages that a sales placemat can confer upon your marketers and sales reps. Here are just a few key benefits you'll likely see:
At the end of the day, the sales placemat is a powerful framework that can allow your company to "feast" on optimized, integrated sales and marketing strategies without putting a dent in the effectiveness of any department. If you can gain leadership buy-in, champion a collaborative development process, and encourage team members to stick to the guidelines outlined on the placemat, you'll almost certainly see an improvement in your business' overall sales performance. Learn More A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in a new book called Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources.  Exciting news! Jamie Northrup, the creative mind behind the Minimalist Hustler blog, has just posted a glowing review of Iceberg Selling.
Though he doesn't consider himself a salesperson, Jamie decided to step outside his comfort zone and read this book. He left it a 5-star review on Amazon, and noted: "A lot of what I read in the book can help beyond sales situations. It can be applied to family, friends, and other personal relationships." Jamie mentioned that he is a fan of Iceberg Selling's cover design, compact size, and how it comes in at a concise 111 pages. Since his blog focuses on helping people earn online income through minimalist side hustles that align with their passions, that makes tons of sense. If you haven’t checked out Jamie’s full review yet, head over to the Minimalist Hustler blog. Thank you, Jamie, for sharing your experience with Iceberg Selling! If you’re curious about how this book can impact your sales and personal connections, give it a read and see what lies beneath the surface. In the world of sales, shortcuts won't get you very far. They only lead to short term success, if any. Karl was invited onto the I Survived Business Podcast, where he talked about how, when it comes to successful sales, business, and leadership, it's about what lies beneath the surface that counts.
There aren't shortcuts to revenue. To have a sustainable sales organization, you need foundations and frameworks. Designing a healthy sales team by putting the right people in the right seats can lead to the sort of lasting improvements a business needs to thrive over the long term. On a personal level, as an entrepreneur, you also need to understand why you do what you do. Our customers are people who are in business for more than just a short term windfall. They want to do more than just rocket to high revenue then sell. This podcast covers how leaders can explore those motivations and foundations to bring out the best in everyone, including themselves.  Marketing automations can be a powerful tool for attracting prospects, nurturing leads, and converting customers. However, they need to be deployed with intent. In other words, they need to be mapped to the different stages of your sales funnel. What your particular "map" looks like will depend on the nature of your business, the makeup of your customer base, and a range of other factors. The key factor is to make an effort in the first place — and if you need to tweak the positioning of a few marketing tactics later, that's okay. Let's look at an example of what automation mapping may look like in practice: Automation Mapping Case Study Here's an example of B2B marketing. Let's say that the sales funnel for our fictional manufacturing company begins when Bill from ABC Corp visits the Plastics Inc. website. Top of Funnel Bill reads interesting content and a case study he likes on the website. As a result, he subscribes to the Plastics, Inc. newsletter. Greg from sales sees that Bill visited the website, and assigns him a lead score based on his activity. Within a day (or perhaps hours or minutes), Bill gets an automated email thanking him for subscribing, along with a PDF of a bonus case study. In the following weeks, Bill received additional emails that introduced him to the Plastics Inc. brand. Middle of Funnel Two weeks later, the latest company newsletter mentions a new certification for Plastic Inc.'s manufacturing plant. This piques Bill's interest since he must use suppliers with this certification to abide by the terms of his customer contracts. He visits the website again and registers for an upcoming webinar. Greg receives an alert that Bill has visited five pages, and spent 10 minutes total on the website. Since Bill is in the lead scoring threshold for a direct follow-up email after the webinar, Greg makes a note to send that ASAP, along with a personal phone call. In the meantime, Bill hasn't taken any additional actions after attending the webinar. However, an automated sequence of post-webinar emails keeps the information fresh in his mind. Moreover, Plastics Inc. has turned off the other automated email sequences Bill was receiving, so there's less "noise" for the post-webinar sequence to overcome. Bottom of Funnel After several email exchanges, Bill and Greg meet for a video conference. At this point, Bill already knows quite a bit about Plastics Inc., and Greg has personally emailed him additional resources to address his specific concerns. With this background, their meeting goes very well; so well, in fact, that after the video call, Greg prepares a proposal and soon closes a new customer. As you can see, there's great power in well-mapped automations when they meet the needs of customers at each stage in their buying journey. But how can you successfully map automation to your company's sales funnel? Important Points to Remember Regarding Marketing Automation
Good People + Good Technology = Success It's no secret that there are some things only a human being can do. That includes anything that requires flexibility and adaptability in the sales process. Sales reps need to constantly shuffle priorities, make on-the-fly decisions, and navigate their messaging as they interact with leads and customers. Automations, when designed and utilized effectively, can take a lot of the mindless, repetitive tasks off your sales reps' plates. Of course, as with all things in life and business, there's an important balance to strike here. Too little automation could mean your sales team is overworked, and can't get around to warm leads as quickly as they need to; too much automation could take the human factor out of the equation, and drive away leads with unique concerns and "one-off" situations. It's vital to keep in mind that when the best-coordinated marketing campaigns — the ones with the most detailed and painstakingly crafted automations — fall flat, you can always lean into your most important resource for help: the people on your marketing and sales teams. Even something as simple as personal calls to leads, instead of automated messages, can work wonders for conversion and retention rates. In summary, make good use of the automation tools at your disposal. Map the right automations to the right stage of the sales funnel; it will help your reps be more effective at nurturing leads and closing deals. Just remember that automation is only one aspect of a well-rounded sales and marketing strategy. Never ignore the power of the "human touch." Implement your technological solutions as extensions of your well-founded and time-tested processes. If you take that approach, you'll almost definitely be able to improve your company's sales performance. Learn More A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in a new book called Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources.  Automation is a powerful tool for increasing the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and driving sales. But for most companies, automation can't be based on numbers alone. Think for a moment about the work your sales reps do: most deals they close are ultimately attributable to their relationship with the customer. They are "on the front lines" with leads and prospects, answering questions they have and addressing concerns that arise. Probably more than anyone else in your business, your sales reps have a finger on the pulse of your customer base.
With that in mind, gathering not just numerical data but also anecdotal evidence when developing an automation strategy is vital. Effective data gathering will make a lead's transition from interacting with marketing content to speaking with a live salesperson much smoother and more effective. Interviewing Your Sales Team One of the best ways your marketing department can come up with great ideas for content is to periodically interview your sales team. These meetings should be very structured and should take place regularly (perhaps once a month). Marketing leaders can use targeted questions that will help them clearly understand and define what problems leads are facing, and which solutions they are especially interested in. On the other side of the table, sales reps can come prepared with stories of their experiences with leads over the past month, and pertinent details of their interactions. Here are some examples of targeted questions that sales and marketing team members can explore together:
The objective of these questions, from Marketing's perspective, is to develop content that would generate leads who are more primed, more prepared, and more interested in conversations about buying your company's solution. You can see how powerful such interview sessions could be! Just imagine: if marketing can use the input from your sales team to create an automated strategy that ensures the right content gets to the right leads, it can be a win-win for everyone involved. Add a well-designed lead-scoring system into the mix. It will make it that much easier to keep low-quality leads exposed to marketing materials while allowing your sales reps to focus more of their attention on high-quality leads —i.e., leads who are more likely to buy. It's true this type of alignment doesn't happen overnight; but once your sales and marketing teams are on the same page and experience wins together, it will build momentum and act as a force multiplier for your company's success. Shaping Automations is an Ongoing Process It's no secret that customer behavior can change for all sorts of external reasons — the time of year, the state of the economy, etc. In addition, most businesses don't have completely static offerings. Products and services may evolve. For these and other reasons, it's vital that shaping automations through data analysis become (or remain) an ongoing process. Over time, your company will likely develop a variety of sales funnels and campaigns around several central themes. They may revolve around a certain season, event, product launch, or discount. Whatever the case may be, tracking engagement and conversion metrics via your CRM and other automation tools will give you a glimpse into the effectiveness of your content. Then you can decide whether to double down on your current approach or make adjustments for future campaigns. Also, don't be afraid to test out new ideas! For example, one private jet chartering company wanted to get higher conversions on their marketing spend. By experimenting with highly specific Google search queries, the company was able to achieve up to a 10% conversion rate based on their targeted landing pages. Develop Nurture Strategies Every company wants to effectively nurture their leads until they are ready to make a purchase decision — and the type of content your leads interact with says a lot about the type of information they need to finally make that decision. One powerful, data-based automation strategy you can lean into is sending email content to your leads based on the pages of the websites they visit. For example, one company leveraged its ambassador program to drive conversion rates. But more than that, they developed an automation around that program which was triggered when a lead clicked through a certain number of testimonials and case studies on their website. The data showed that the interest was there; the automated email sequence struck while the iron was hot. Of course, it's also important to offer the right thing at the right time in the buyer's journey. Lead nurturing strategies can become counterproductive if they result in a lot of wasted time and effort on low-quality leads. For instance, be careful when and to whom you offer free consultations. If that offer is mainly focused on middle-of-funnel prospects, they may only want free information without any serious intent to purchase. The end result may be a lot of free consultations and zero purchases. The point is, that it's important to adequately qualify leads before transitioning them to direct interactions with your sales team. Automation strategies that take this important factor into account will be most effective for your business. At the end of the day, you need hard data to successfully automate your processes; but you also need to keep a finger on the pulse of your customer base. Conduct regular interviews with your salespeople. Experiment with different automations. Develop realistic nurture strategies. If you do all these things, you're that much closer to optimizing your sales performance and maximizing profitability. Learn More A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in a new book called Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us. Or sign up for our newsletter for more valuable resources. |
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