3 Marketing Operations Mistakes That Will Break Your Sales and Marketing Alignment

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abdulahad
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Joined: Tue Aug 16, 2022 6:54 am

3 Marketing Operations Mistakes That Will Break Your Sales and Marketing Alignment

Post by abdulahad »

What do the marketing leads look like? Where are all our leads going? On the marketing operations team, we get asked these questions often by the demand generation and sales teams. Lead management is a critical piece to effective sales and marketing alignment, and without proper planning and execution, leads cannot move smoothly through the funnel. Marketing operations is responsible for this on both a tactical and strategic level, and we need input and feedback from demand generation and sales. However, things do not always go as planned. We get asked all the time about the validity of a lead or why a lead was routed to a certain person or team. In this blog, I’ll share some common marketing operations mistakes I’ve come across. If you’re interested in learning about more, you can register for my upcoming webinar (tomorrow), 8 Biggest Mistakes Marketing Operations Makes and How to Avoid Them. Let’s take a look at three big marketing operations mistakes and how you can avoid them: Myopic Lead Scoring One of the biggest mistakes in marketing operations happens when leads are not properly qualified, or prioritized, as they enter the funnel. This is often the result of faulty lead scoring. For one, scoring can be done on an ad hoc, as needed basis, but it will lead to inconsistent results. Another pitfall is that lead scoring may be designed through the lens of marketing without critical input from sales.

To combat these issues, follow the recommendations below: 1. Centralize global scoring. Regional demand gen marketers may feel that scoring should be localized because of their unique understanding of their markets. However, regional scoring may lead to fluctuating lead scores and confusion about lead performance globally. At Marketo, we work with our global demand generation teams to determine how we want to score based on demographics and behavior. For example, we normalize how Phone Number List leads are scored based on their job title. We set up a rule that recognizes a job title containing “gerente” for the European Spanish version of “manager and then scores the lead accordingly. On the behavior side, we have matrices that dictate scoring by program channel type, investment level, and lead response action. This centralized approach has greatly helped us evaluate the quality of top-of-funnel leads coming in and understand our program performance. 2. Align scoring with sales efficiency and incentives. While systematized lead scoring provides invaluable metrics to the demand generation team about which programs to drive more of, the lead score should also resonate with the sales team as well. Too often, we hear that sales distrusts the lead score, which leads to them not utilizing the scores at all. To curb this, it’s important to ensure that the scoring is valid and works to support sales. One way we have done this at Marketo is by bumping up lead scores for those who fill out a “Contact Me” form.

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We also score accounts, which aligns with an account-based marketing strategy for both marketing and sales. We built in a component of our scoring that takes into account (pun intended) the lead’s account score, and sales is incentivized to go after accounts with a higher propensity to buy. As our business has grown, there has also been a greater need to drill down on scoring granularity. Two years ago, we started scoring on product interest to give our internal sales team an idea of the products a lead was researching. This year, we did a deep dive on looking at leads in specific industries that we wanted to grow sales in. Unorganized Lead Routing After you properly qualify inbound leads, you’ll want to decide when they should be routed and to whom. Lead routing can vary from being quite simple to fairly complicated depending on the needs of your organization. When I started at Marketo more than three years ago, the company was much smaller and our lead routing requirements were much simpler in both scope and magnitude. It was fairly easy to update teams and territory assignments. Fast forward three years—our sales team has more than doubled, there is a strategic shift to an account-based marketing strategy, and our international teams have expanded. Our lead routing needed to change accordingly and we had to have a solid plan in place from start to finish.
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