Marketing planning often revolves around demand-generation strategies, ad campaigns, messaging, and the like. However, the most significant opportunities are often deeper down the pipeline after a lead is handed off from marketing. Marketing leaders who find ways to contribute throughout the customer lifecycle can see exceptional ROI, even when marketing budgets are thin.
Marketing teams can work with sales to align messaging and create a unified customer experience. Likewise, they can contribute to sales enablement with customer data and a well-designed handoff. Finally, marketing can help the customer success team identify opportunities to upsell and reduce churn.
Leaders should look to the following areas to maintain revenue growth.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Begin by mapping each engagement along the customer journey, then assign the individuals and teams who contribute and are responsible for each. You want an accurate picture of the customer journey to identify opportunities to increase conversions and touchpoints where you may be missing the mark. At touchpoints where both marketing and sales contribute, implement communication protocols to maximize collaboration. Tracking the appropriate KPIs at these touchpoints will bring valuable visibility and drive continuous improvement.
Sales Enablement
Marketing and sales teams have used automation and enablement tools for some time but haven't always had cross-team integration and visibility. Imagine how useful it would be for a salesperson to know which marketing collateral their prospects were engaging with; they would have great insight into their pain points, favorite features, and what motivates them to convert. Sales teams can also use predictive analytics like lead scoring to proactively reach out to leads and pull them through the funnel.
Customer Success and Expansion
Economic uncertainty will significantly impact retention and customer success in recession years. Identifying when customers are dropping off or likely to cancel will be vital to reducing churn. Likewise, you want to look for indications that a customer is ready for new features or an upgraded plan. To do this, marketing and customer success teams must work together to segment customers and analyze what behaviors provide insight into customer behavior.
Bringing it all together
Driving collaboration across teams requires the right tech stack. You need an integrated system so that teams have visibility into each other and can share information seamlessly. A well-planned tech stack will also maintain data consistency, providing a single source of truth when analyzing your performance. As you consider the growth opportunities mentioned in this article, review your tech stack and whether it enables you to succeed across the organization.