We know you're working hard to close record-breaking deals. In the dynamic landscape of sales and marketing, the pursuit of strategies that not only amplify your pipeline but also optimize closing deals while enhancing overall efficiency is crucial. Looking for ways to maximize your pipeline, close more (and better) deals, and increase the efficiency of your sales and marketing processes? Follow these tips to build your high performing sales and marketing funnel.
Audit your lead management process
Turning leads into customers is a huge priority for both sales and marketing teams. Therefore, having a clear, agreed-upon process will support your teams in filling pipeline faster and closing more deals quicker. Audit your lead management process to ensure it’s tuned to maximum efficiency.
An effective audit is a detailed review of your sales process including everything from staff and software, to strategy. Audits identify gaps and opportunities for improvement. Here are some questions to ask during an audit:
- Do sales and marketing have a shared definition for each step of the demand generation funnel?
- Are the right leads getting to your salespeople at the right time?
- Do you have agreed-upon criteria for what constitutes a sales-ready lead?
- Is sales closing the loop on next steps for each lead? And — most importantly — are you nurturing the leads sent back?
- Are your forms, nurture flows, and automations/workflows up to date?
Knowing where to prioritize your efforts can be confusing. That’s why understanding your leads’ paths to purchase is imperative, and why a lead management process audit should be a top priority now.
Want expert advice on how to audit your marketing and sales ecosystem, or unsure where to start? The MRM Yetis offer a Lead Management Demand Generation Ecosystem Workshop that where we walk through your lead management process and provide customized recommendations for assuring that no lead is left behind.
Implement or update a lead scoring system
A lead scoring system easily identifies how likely your lead is to close, based on parameters that are unique to your organization’s definition of sales-ready leads. Lead scoring automates your lead management process and places leads where they belong in the funnel, significantly reducing time you may spend looking at each lead as it comes in.
If you have a lead scoring model in place, take some time to review the positive and negative triggers to make sure they align with your current marketing and sales ecosystem. Does your team still use lead scoring rules in their sales and marketing process? Do the associated triggers need to be updated or removed? Do you find that you have to override the automated scoring often?
Now is the time to implement a lead scoring model if you do not already have one. Lead scoring models can be as simple or complex as your organization requires, and even a simple model is a huge benefit to your sales and marketing teams.
Not certain how to implement an effective lead scoring model? The MRM Yetis can work with you to define and build one!
Make sure your systems are integrated properly
Improperly integrated systems can be a huge strain on your organization. Missing data, disconnected data, incorrect data, and manual intervention are all symptoms of a disconnected system. Visibility into your entire tech stack is foundational for sales and marketing success.
Take a look at your tech ecosystem to see if there are sync errors, field-mapping issues, or reporting gaps. Knowing what you don’t know will provide a roadmap of what work to do for the rest of the quarter (or year).
If you’re not sure where to get started in aligning your marketing and sales organization, get your Yeti on and let us be your guide through the process. If you have already made steps towards alignment, we can help refine things for you to make sure your demand generation machine is running on premium.
Clean data closes more deals
The better your insights, the better business decisions you can make. And better business decisions means closing more deals, more efficiently.
Your CRM is the heart of your organization’s success. Do you trust the data in your CRM to provide your organization with a clear idea of what works, what doesn’t, and what is missing? Can you see where your leads are coming from, and what is contributing to closed deals?
If not, it’s time for some spring data cleaning. Here are some ways to clear out the clutter and ensure your team is working on the right prospects.
- Cleansing data: take some time to audit your entire data ecosystem and scrub obvious bad data, such as hard-bounced or unsubscribed contacts, duplicate contact records, and unengaged contacts.
- Normalize Data: create a standard for data management and input into the CRM. Determine rules and field requirements for creating new contacts. Onboard or train all affected teams with updated processes.
- Deduplication: in addition to deduplicating contact records, you should reconcile all properties, forms, workflows, and reports to ensure your team is using the correct data.
- Append Data: update lead source information to contact records by appending campaign data to records that meet certain criteria. If you use the campaigns feature in HubSpot, focus on ensuring each campaign has all assets associated and that campaign goals information is filled out.
- Segment Data: build customized groups to personalize messaging based on lifecycle stage, industry, target personas, or specific needs. By creating tailored campaigns and messaging that resonates with different types of buyers, you improve your likelihood to close business.
Clean data isn’t just important in one part of a process or system, but all parts.
Need help from an expert to define data strategies and best practices for your organization? Our Yetis can help you leverage data within multiple systems with advanced segmentation customized for your company.
Show your unengaged contacts some love
You've already done the hard work of acquiring new leads, don't let that effort go to waste! Contacts with low engagement are more than just unopened emails — they're opportunities to retain and upsell. Create a re-engagement campaign specifically for low-engagement contacts.
Start this process by first identifying unengaged contacts that should be removed from your database completely. This will ensure that your team is only contacting appropriate leads.
From there, determine your rules for what "low-engagement" means to your team. This will determine who is part of your re-engagement campaign. HubSpot has several fields you can use to create the appropriate list of contacts for your re-engagement campaign:
- Last email date
- Last form submission
- Create date
- Last email opened
- Last email clicked.
- Recent conversion date
- Last reply
- Last date purchased
- Latest activity date
When copywriting for your re-engagement campaign, make sure to focus on solving your client's business needs and speaking directly to their pain points. What problems do your leads face on a day to day basis? What problems can you solve? Let your skills and testimonies shine through to help spark a new interest from your readers.
The goal is to become top of mind to your lead and attract contacts back into your sales funnel, where they can be worked by marketing and sales teams.
Need some help identifying what prospects to focus on, building campaigns and workflows, and identifying opportunities for sales enablement success? The MRM Yetis are experts in creating re-engagement campaigns that work.
Conclusion
Getting your marketing and sales technology, processes and people in alignment means that you have the foundation to build (and continue to grow) a robust and high performing sales and marketing funnel.
Do you know you need help but don't have the time (or expertise) to handle these things yourself? Contact the Yetis -- We'd love to help your sales and marketing funnel!
