In professional services, every lead is precious, as significant personal time is spent building relationships and trust. Selling services is different than selling soap and your time is spread across marketing, sales, and service delivery.
What happens when marketing and sales operate in silos? Lost sales, wasted effort, and frustrated teams are the results.
The Impact of Misalignment
At Summit Executive, a boutique leadership firm, marketing filled the pipeline, but sales struggled to close deals. The 3 partners reviewed results and saw the problems.
- Marketing’s top-of-funnel (TOFU) blogs and social media attracted executives.
- Executives who expressed interest were not ready for sales.
- Sales efforts were premature and prospects received mixed messages.
The impacts were less sales and less partner income. The partners and their marketing and sales managers (Team) plotted strategy.
“Not Ready For Sales”?
At Summit, most prospects were “curious sniffers.” They had interests but no immediate needs. The Team needed to identify serious prospects.
The Team defined “Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline (BANT)” as criteria for prospect qualification. It decided:
- To narrow its marketing actions to attract its ideal client.
- Marketing’s role is to qualify TOFU prospects and move them to the middle of funnel (MOFU).
- In TOFU, the prospect’s needs and urgency will be reviewed.
- To launch webinars as attendees often have specific needs.
- To use MOFU magnets (i.e., case study) to move prospects to MOFU.
They mapped what current clients asked before becoming clients to learn questions to ask prospects.
Creating the Marketing and Sales Bridge
The Team made 3 decisions:
- Meet weekly to review the pipeline.
- Use a CRM to track the pipeline and automate manual tasks and outreach.
- Hire the right CRM vendor to set up and train the Team.
The team knew the CRM was a single source of truth to align marketing and sales.
Summit used its CRM to synchronize their marketing and sales efforts, transforming chaos into collaboration including:
- Shared Lead Scoring – The Team defined “sales-ready” to include 2 prospect actions i.e., download white paper and attend 1 webinar.
- Outreach based on conditions met – Personalized, automatic engagement based on TOFU and MOFU actions.
- Sales funnel – Weekly meetings were organized based on prospects by stage.
- Unified messaging – With centralized prospect information, the Team personalized conversations and avoided repetitive outreach.
- Sales Manager reminders to follow up based on prospect actions.
The team gained visibility into what actions drove revenue and began to tailor their approach.
The Bottom Line Is BOFU
The bottom of the funnel (BOFU) is where decisions are made. For Summit, once prospects reached BOFU, the 3 principals and the 2 sales managers made sales. In fact, within 6 months:
- Conversion rates soared by 40%.
- Marketing creating high-intent content, precisely tailored to what sales needed.
- Lead response time plummeted from 2 days to 2 hours.
Most importantly, finger-pointing gave way to genuine collaboration.
The Team’s CRM was the glue factor binding marketing and sales into one, high-performing team.
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