The B2B SaaS Marketing Blog

How Marketing Can Improve Performance By Collaborating With Sales

by 

Alan Silvestri

Last updated: December 13th, 2024

Long buying cycles, stalled pipelines, and an ever-growing list of closed-lost leads may seem like the sales team’s challenge to solve.

Yet fewer sales mean a smaller budget for all teams across the company, including marketing.

To increase sales volume, most marketing teams double down on optimizing campaigns to drive more traffic. Yet driving more traffic won’t increase sales volume if the current traffic isn’t converting.

Instead, long buying cycles, stalled pipelines, and low sales volume are often symptoms of a disjointed customer journey caused by a disconnect between the marketing and sales teams.

While each team may have separate responsibilities, both own different parts of the buyer journey, and friction during that journey can hurt conversions.

Therefore, the solution to increasing sales is creating a cohesive buyer journey that seamlessly moves the prospect to the point of sale.

As both marketing and sales own different aspects of the buyer journey, achieving a frictionless experience for prospects requires collaboration between marketing and sales. The real challenge is defining how the sales and marketing team can work together to support one another rather than operating in silos.  

In this post, we’ll lay out the step-by-step strategy we use to help marketing and sales align on the customer journey to deliver a seamless customer journey that allows your company to close more high quality prospects in less time. 

Why Is It Important For Sales And Marketing To Work Together?

Although the sales team is responsible for closing prospects, their ability to convert those leads into customers depends on the quality of the lead and that lead’s stage in the buyer journey.

The good news is that marketing can control these variables, ultimately giving marketing the power to influence sales volume.

The only problem is that marketing often believes they are sending high quality, prepared leads, but sales isn’t closing them.

On the other hand, the sales team often believes they can’t close the leads because they don’t match the ICP or aren’t educated enough yet to buy. 

As both sales and marketing own different parts of the customer journey, this misalignment causes friction for prospects. They may receive mixed messaging, poorly timed communication, and a generally negative experience that ultimately costs the sale.

In contrast, if marketing works with sales to understand the prospect’s pain points and objections, they can craft better messaging and serve the right resources at the right time.

The resulting marketing efforts will be far more effective and ultimately drive more revenue for the entire company. It’s also easier to justify increasing marketing budget if you can tie revenue to specific marketing efforts.  

Below, we’ll discuss exactly how marketing can work with the sales team to increase total revenue.

Step 1: Align On The Ideal Customer

Audience avatars are often vague and based on assumptions.

As a result, the marketing team’s campaigns tend to have vague, unconvincing language that fails to attract the right prospects.

For example, if you sell fundraising software and assume your audience purchases it to find more donors, you’ll tailor your marketing copy to address how it helps them close more donors. 

However, more detailed customer research may reveal customers actually purchase it to improve relationships with existing donors. In that case, your marketing copy will be much more effective if it addresses the pain point of improving relationships with existing donors.

Similarly, if you believe the VP of Finance initially discovers and purchases your software, you’ll tailor your marketing strategy to target that persona. However, if it’s actually the Director of Donor Relations who feels the pain point and initially discovers the product before pitching it to the check signer (the VP of Finance), the top of funnel marketing campaigns should target the Director of Donor Relations.

To ensure our clients target the right people at the right funnel stages with the right message, gather qualitative and quantitative data to identify your best customers. 

We have a detailed process to identify a SaaS company’s best customers, and here are four ways we gather data to craft an ideal customer profile:

• CRM: Look at data on your highest paying and highest LTV customers.
• Sales team: Ask them for the company names of the best customers.
• Customer support: Ask them for the company names of the happiest customers.
• Customer survey: You can send a survey or poll to existing customers that gave you a high net promoter score.

This quantitative data will allow you to define your target audience more precisely so you know who to target at each stage of the funnel. 

The next step is to ask the sales team for qualitative information on the ideal customer to better understand their pain points and what drives them to initiate a sales conversation.

Ask sales for specific scenarios that cause them to reach out and attend a demo or sales call to understand the prospect’s language.

In addition to gathering information on the prospect, it’s also important to understand the sales team’s processes. 

What happens when a lead comes in? What are the next steps after the initial call with a prospect? 

Understanding the sales team’s role in the buyer journey will help you tailor your marketing messaging to support the sales conversation rather than sending the prospect mixed messages. 

For example, you can ask about common FAQs and objections that arise at each step of the conversation and create supporting materials to move the prospect through the journey more efficiently. 

You can also ask for battle cards to understand your company’s key differentiators and highlight them in your marketing messaging.

Another benefit of talking to the sales team is that it will allow you to understand specific lead profiling data the sales team needs, which you can incorporate into lead forms. 

Step 2: Capture The Right Data

SaaS companies usually have plenty of data in their CRM, but it rarely provides meaningful insights and is often inaccurate.

With different data points and no clear success indicators, it’s difficult for sales and marketing to agree on important KPIs and use the data to improve prospect quality. 

To solve this problem, you need a single source of truth that provides accurate data on metrics that equate to revenue rather than vanity metrics. We have a separate resource that outlines how we set up marketing operations for clients, but these are the most critical metrics to identify:

• Win rates
• ACVs
• Time-to-close (by each prospect segment)

Once you have access to accurate data, you’ll better understand your pipeline’s efficiency and notice patterns between different industries, sources, and geographies.    

This data will help you better understand which prospect segments are strongest or weakest so that you can tailor your marketing strategy and budget accordingly.

For example, you’ll understand which segments require more nurturing further down the funnel before increasing spend to acquire those deals. 

It’s also important to track sales velocity (i.e., deals created, deal value, time to progress through stages, and deals won and closed won value) to better understand your overall marketing performance. 

You can also analyze sales velocity by various customer segments to understand where marketing performance is strongest and weakest and ensure you’re acquiring leads more likely to turn into revenue.

Once you have data on the buyer journey, the next step to solving the breakdown between sales and marketing is capturing the right data on new leads. 

This will help the sales team because they’ll know whether the lead is a good fit, where to route it, and how to personalize the sales process.

Ideally, capture as many of the following data points as possible:

• Company size
• Industry
• Pricing needs
• Number of employees or users
• Names and roles of important contacts
• Company goals
• Goals for using your product
• Tools they were using before to accomplish these goals
• Any hesitations or initial concerns about your product

However, take a progressive profiling approach and avoid asking for all of this information at once as it may turn away prospects. 

There are also plenty of different ways you can capture this information, including:

• Behavioral data: Website and marketing material activity
• Declared data: Data they submitted via a form field
• Enriched data: Records that were expanded by a 3rd party data provider

Once you have access to this data and align with the sales team, it’s easier to create a seamless customer journey and ensure the right prospects see the right marketing messaging at the right time.

Step 3: Optimize The Marketing-Sales Hand Off 

We established that sales and marketing own different parts of the customer journey, so the next step is to work with sales to define who owns what stage of the journey and how to optimize it to minimize friction.  

The first step of this process is aligning on the definition of a quality MQL and SQL. 

If there’s any misalignment on these definitions, sales won’t prioritize leads that marketing scored highly, and on the flip side, marketing won’t send the sales team prospects they consider high quality. The result is a low conversion rate that reflects poorly on both teams.

To solve this problem, talk to sales to understand the criteria of a quality SQL and then adjust your definition of a quality MQL accordingly to ensure the sales team receives quality leads they can convert as efficiently as possible.

Then, create a lead prioritization criteria to ensure sales addresses the highest intent leads first as not all leads are equally valuable. 

This criteria should cover both the profile and intent level of a quality SQL.

The profile was primarily covered in step one, and the intent level is where they are in the buying journey. If you send leads to the sales team too early in the customer journey, sales will waste time doing preliminary education that could have been accomplished through marketing.  

Here are some things to consider when scoring the intent level of a prospect:

• Lead Form: A lead that fills out a high-intent form such as Request a Demo/Start a Trial should be prioritized over a lower intent form like a lead magnet (case study, calculator, etc.) download.
• Outreach: If a prospect reaches out directly through a LinkedIn DM or raises their hand during a webinar, they’re likely a higher intent lead than someone who passively engages with your content.

Considering both intent and prospect profile fit, prioritize leads accordingly by sending the highest scoring leads to a sales rep to address immediately and lower scoring leads to a more passive sales cycle:

Finally, who you send the lead to within the sales team and the information provided to the sales rep will have a major impact on conversion rates. Here are some additional factors to consider:

• Lead routing: Send leads to reps within that lead’s territory to ensure the sales rep is familiar with that territory’s market conditions. Additionally, send the highest scoring leads to the highest performing reps.
• Notifications and to-dos: To help the sales team deliver a compelling pitch to each prospect, provide information on both the prospect’s demographics, as well as their pain points and why they’re interested in the solution. Too often, marketers send a contact to sales with no explanation of why that person is interested in the solution. As a result, sales wastes the prospect’s time uncovering information that was already provided, and the sales team doesn’t have an opportunity to tailor their pitch. 

Step 4: Optimize Pipeline Efficiency

High value B2B SaaS deals require extensive follow-up and are often lost because of over/under communication or mixed messaging from sales and marketing.

If the sales team is responsible for manually sending the follow-up, the timing of that message might be off, or they may forget to send it altogether. 

To solve this problem, marketing can set up automated nurture sequences to ensure every prospect receives the right message at the right time.

We create different automated nurture sequences for different prospect segments. For example, you can create playbooks for:

• New Deals: This sequence nurtures prospects from MQL to SQL and provides educational resources on their pain point and how your solution solves it.
• Lagging Deals: If a prospect is stuck as an SQL, this email sequence answers common objections and moves them further in the buyer journey. 
• Unresponsive Deals: This sequence is designed for leads that have gone cold and reopen the conversation to see if now is a better time.  
• Closed Lost Deals: These are for deals that were never a great fit, and you can use this data to better understand how to improve your marketing and qualification criteria.

After creating each nurture sequence, talk to the sales team to ensure they understand the send cadence and content of each email to ensure they never send conflicting or poorly timed messages. 

Take The Next Step To Improve Marketing And Sales Collaboration

The steps outlined in this article are the exact processes we use to help our clients improve sales and marketing collaboration, though there’s plenty of depth to each step.

For example, accurately setting up your CRM to capture the right data and defining a quality MQL/SQL can be tricky. If one of the four steps outlined above is executed incorrectly, your pipeline likely won’t improve.

If you want some additional help improving marketing and sales collaboration, we’ve executed this process for dozens of SaaS companies and can help you avoid common pitfalls.

To see if it’s the right step for your team, reach out today and we’ll assess your current operations.