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How To Maximize SaaS Growth with Sales-Marketing Alignment
Developing an effective SaaS sales and marketing program is no small feat.
Unlike traditional businesses, SaaS companies operate under a unique model, demanding tailored digital marketing strategies for success. Your product isn’t a tangible item in the same way, so it’s significantly harder to pitch it to a typical audience via Facebook or LinkedIn or hope that influencer marketing will somehow move the needle. Plus, while many retailers generate revenue even from single, one-time purchases, the SaaS framework relies much more heavily on ongoing subscriptions.
Further complicating matters is the stark misalignment in objectives and timelines between sales and marketing departments.
Marketing tends to focus on long-term brand building and lead generation, while sales is typically more concerned with short-term revenue targets and closing deals. This mismatch can lead to friction as marketing may feel their efforts are undervalued if immediate sales aren't realized, while sales may think marketing's initiatives as ineffective if they don't lead to immediate conversions.
Thankfully, many thriving SaaS firms have paved the way in aligning their sales and marketing efforts. Here are some proven strategies to get you started:
Meet Regularly
Maintaining the connection between sales and marketing is all about prioritizing communication. Regular meetings are key to preventing teams from operating in isolation.
Start by organizing an onboarding "smarketing" meeting for each new sales team member. This is the perfect opportunity to share processes, resources, and best practices right from the get-go. Being present at these meetings keeps marketers in the loop on sales progress and allows for timely support. Use this time to dole out details on upcoming campaigns and content, while also tapping into the creative well for fresh ideas.
Don't underestimate the power of attending events together. Whether it's a local industry meetup or a casual office happy hour, mingling outside the office environment builds stronger bonds. So, grab a drink and seize the chance to connect with your sales team on a personal level.
Create SLA's To Set Expectations
Sales teams may gripe about the quality of leads provided by marketing, but a major complaint from marketers about sales is the lack of follow-up with those leads. While marketing automation has eased the handoff process, it's essential to establish expectations for follow-up. Our recommendation? Craft a service level agreement (SLA) that outlines:
- Criteria for when a lead transitions from marketing to sales
- The timeframe for sales to follow up with a good-fit lead
- How often sales will follow up with a good-fit lead
- The criteria you have set in place for determining a good-fit lead
Establishing best practices for the sales follow-up process will instill the habit of reaching out to promising leads within your sales team. Once this protocol is established, the subsequent action is to track the influx of suitable leads into your pipeline and monitor the transition from MQLs (those fitting the criteria) to SQLs (those fitting the criteria, displaying interest, and prepared for sales engagement).
Nurture Your Leads Through The Funnel
For SaaS companies, nurturing leads throughout the buyer's journey is essential for guiding prospects toward a subscription or purchase.
As it goes, from a marketing perspective, the focus on generating high-quality leads sometimes overshadows the importance of nurturing them until they convert into closed-won deals. Lead nurturing comes in various forms, but one of the most effective approaches is consistently providing relevant, valuable content throughout the buyer's journey.
To achieve this, marketers should tailor content to suit the different lifecycle stages a buyer progresses through before making a purchase (visitor, lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, opportunity). During the awareness stage or at the top of the funnel, blog posts, guides, or e-books are excellent for nurturing leads. As leads move into the consideration stage or the middle of the funnel, webinars or templates serve as suitable options. Finally, when leads reach the bottom of the funnel, demos or consultations can help seal the deal.
Beyond the content itself, it's crucial to develop strategies for promoting that content to your contact base. A thoughtful email marketing strategy, for instance, can effectively guide contacts through the various lifecycle stages. By supporting leads through the funnel, marketers can smooth out the marketing-to-sales handoff process.
USE SALES ENABLEMENT TOOLS
Marketing and sales teams that make do with a variety of ad hoc content collateral face an uphill battle when it comes to cataloging and locating assets. When marketers and sellers have to search through multiple silos for a single piece of sales resource, they expend the time and energy they could have spent engaging buyers. These inefficiencies add up and can impact revenue.
Sales enablement can end this battle once and for all. A comprehensive sales enablement solution gathers all of your content into one centralized, organized location, making endless searching a thing of history. With a user-friendly enablement platform like HubSpot that seamlessly integrates with various marketing and sales systems, neither marketers nor sellers will ever have to go on a wild goose chase for content ever again.
PRIORITIZE THE CUSTOMER
Customer satisfaction should be the primary incentive behind any action that either department takes. This high-level goal eliminates competition, tension, and the narrow focus on quotas or statistics that don’t capture the entire customer experience. Alignment happens organically when both teams want to make customers happy at every stage of their buying journey. Prioritize customer needs, and your initiatives will naturally facilitate collaboration between your sales and marketing teams.
WHY YOU NEED A SMARKETING STRATEGY
A strong sales and marketing alliance is increasingly becoming more of a necessity rather than merely an organizational pipe dream.
Outdated business practices and poor communication between these two critical teams can creep into even the most forward-thinking companies. SaaS enterprises can fall prey to this precisely because the nature of the industry is to upgrade and improve continuously. Digital media and advertising will also frequently present businesses with new promotional opportunities and strategies to pursue. This makes the propensity for each department to veer off in its own—sometimes misguided—direction very high.
Now, imagine sales and marketing meeting up regularly to share their findings and experiences in order to come up with a standardized customer journey that gives everyone a clear overview of what the target for each stage in the sales funnel is. That's what "smarketing" is based on. With a focus on sustained growth, a hybrid smarketing team can be far more responsive to changes in customer demands and tailor more compelling content.
SALES & MARKETING ALIGNMENT WITH HUBSPOT
Whether you’re looking to align your sales and marketing teams or you want to leverage a CRM to grow your SaaS business, contact us - our team is ready to help you fully harness HubSpot's sales and marketing suite.
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