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Marketing and sales teams used to have different responsibilities. The marketing team is responsible for generating leads, and the sales team converts those leads into customers. But today, the lines between the responsibilities of the marketing and sales teams have blurred. The prospect is no longer a sale with limited information. They did a lot of research before reaching out, consuming dozens of marketing assets in the process. This shift created the need for a new model of how marketing and sales work—one that required close coordination between the two teams. To create this alignment, marketers are using a number of marketing and sales enablement activities to generate leads, qualify them, and move sales-qualified leads into the pipeline:
Our latest survey results show that more than 50% of marketers agree that the following marketing activities "significantly help" improve the effectiveness of their sales teams: Generate more marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads (77%) Create more industry mailing list to engage and educate potential customers (74%) Generate leads through a company website (72%) Create content for use in the sales process (54%) Improve CRM use in marketing (53%) Other popular activities listed as very helpful include automating marketing emails (50%), standardizing email templates used throughout the sales process (28%), lead scoring (22%), and implementing meeting booking tools for potential Customers can schedule time for salespeople easily (22%). Less popular activities include:
Use surveys, quizzes, or other interactive content to further identify potential customers: Only 16% of marketers report that this helps significantly. Set service level agreements for lead volume and quality: Only 12% of marketers report that this helps a lot. Implement website chat: Only 9% of marketers report that it helps a lot. However, some less popular activities may simply be the result of low usage. In fact, our findings show that more marketers plan to start using interactive content this year than any other technology or strategy to gather lead information : While 97% of marketers plan to continue using lead forms and landing pages to gather more information about prospects in 2019, many also plan to start using more advanced strategies: