Increase Revenue Without Spending More on Marketing

By now, you probably already have established plans to grow your revenue in 2018.  These plans likely include a mix of different initiatives aimed at attracting more leads and new business, and odds are good all these different initiatives cost money.

What if you could also generate an additional 10% in revenue without spending another dime on marketing?

Sounds pretty good, right?

According to Hubspot, “misalignment between sales and marketing technologies and processes costs B2B companies 10% of revenue or more per year.”

You’re probably asking yourself “what is misalignment between sales and marketing”?

In simple terms, marketing and sales alignment means that both groups are aligned toward the same goals, namely a shared revenue goal. When the two groups work independently of each other with different goals, you end up with misalignment.

Statistic: 22% of organizations says their sales and marketing relationship are tightly aligned. Source: Hubspot – State of Inbound 2017

What Does Misalignment Look Like?

Misalignment between marketing and sales occurs for a number of reasons. Some of the biggest are:

• Marketing has one idea of what quantifies a qualified lead, and sales has a different idea. Support stat: 79% of B2B marketers have not established lead scoring.
• Leads generated by marketing are not qualified and never result in sales. The biggest reason for this is a lack of lead nurturing. Supporting stat: 79% of marketing leads never convert into sales. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
• Marketing sends all leads directly to sales. Sales perceives most of the leads as poor quality, and fails to follow-up either due to a lack of time or lack of confidence in the lead quality. Supporting stat: 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to Sales; however, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. (Source: MarketingSherpa)
• Sales needs content to help close deals and in many cases they are creating it on their own, or just doing without. Since they’re not aligned with marketing, they are not clued in as to what content already exists. There’s a good chance your marketing team has already created content needed for sales, but sales doesn’t know it exists.

If It’s Broke, Fix It

If this sounds like your organization, think about the all the potential revenue you’re losing on leads you paid to generate. Capturing an additional 10% in revenue just by aligning marketing and sales doesn’t seem that far fetched.

Supporting Stat: Marketing and sales alignment can make an organization 67 percent better at closing deals. Moreover, marketing can generate 209 percent more value. (Source: Marketo study)

Listed below are six things you can start now to increase revenue without spending more on marketing.

1. Establish a shared revenue goal for marketing and sales. This can be as simple as a single revenue goal, or revenue goals by division, product, etc. Learn more about establishing common goals.
2. Develop a system for Lead Scoring. Utilize technology to automate lead scoring to identify quality leads.
3. Agree on metrics. Define what makes a lead a MQL and a SQL.
4. Establish a Sales & Marketing SLA. The SLA should define how many leads marketing will deliver to sales, and how quickly (specific time-frame) sales will contact the leads.
5. Utilize technology to measure where the truth lies. Utilize a marketing platform, such as Hubspot, to measure each teams performance.
6. Hold regular Smarketing meetings. At least once per month, meetings should be held to identify problems and brainstorm solutions.

Check out this recent article to learn more best practices for marketing and sales alignment.

Help your marketing and sales teams work better together with HubSpot Free CRM. We’ll even give you a free demo! Just call or click today and we’ll be happy to show you how you can increase productivity with HubSpot CRM!