As the head of your company, it is a daunting task for your CEO to decide where and how to allocate...
Does your organisation still face questions of how to get your sales and marketing to generate growth together? This happens to be one of the key takeaways that we run into with our customers on a weekly – if not daily – basis. Lately, it has become apparent that a lot of companies are setting up marketing as the primary driver of their commercial growth, while their marketing staff learning the ropes of a rapidly shifting landscape. However, in Finland people still do not fully realise how comprehensive marketing truly is, writes HS Visio.
We see that an organisation seeking prosperity should integrate the departments and metrics that are responsible for business growth together. This is a change that calls for an organisation’s ability to understand what kind of operational models generate growth, along with an aggregate that captures the focus of both the CEO and the marketing and sales executives.
Parallel operations within an organisation devour time and money
Genuine actions are born from simplifying thinking, designing together, and setting common goals and clear metrics. Unfortunately, a lot of organisations make changes with a technology-first approach that ultimately fails to consider the end-users – the very people who are subject to change.
In a siloed operation of departments, something always happens that cannot be fully taken into account. For example: adapting wrong or incompatible technologies together and thus losing capital and resources.
Accelerating growth in sales requires diverse know-how, and any organisation should internally hand out roles and responsibility areas to their designated people. However, all departments should work in unison to reach their common goals. Often, this also calls for a reshaping of the organisation itself.
Dare to measure results
Many organisations might internally hold a set of completely different metrics that are at odds with one another. Companies that have separated marketing from sales may have marketing metrics for, per se, campaign CTRs or view counts. In other organisations, the cooperation of marketing and sales – along with different processes and results – can be measured as incoming cash flow, new deals, or by increasing the number of clients.
Unfortunately, marketing is too often seen as a necessary evil that doesn’t yield any real results because companies simply lack a daring spirit or fail to measure things correctly. To measure successfully, you need technology, and your sales need a tracking tool. Unity is also an equal requirement when combining marketing and sales. The right metrics are the best way to prove the functionality of the business process – individual gut feelings are far more difficult to navigate.
Refining the sales process is one of the most crucial tasks of any organisation that aims to do successful sales. When you have defined together how your sales process progresses and what your measured goals are, you’ll also face the following questions: what is a lead, what is a qualified lead, and how can you verify the revenue from taken actions as incoming cash flow for your organisation.
Allow time for change
Modern sales and marketing require a quick reaction to changes – particularly in developing the cooperation of different business departments. Even though the speed of change in society and working life will only accelerate, it’s also wise to allow change its given time to take place. Because change management is far from being one of the simplest of tasks.
Our advice: don’t try to solve every problem at a single time. Instead, it’s best to break changes into digestible pieces. Because at the end of the day we’re all people, and changes in human interaction always take time. Shaping and embracing change calls for tenacity and repetition, so that it becomes a natural component in the everyday lives of different business departments.
Did you know that brands that possess a high digital maturity have more than double the likelihood to grow their market share? You can discover this in a Boston Consulting Group research, which – along with digital maturity and its many stages – is discussed by Digital Strategist Miia Koverola in the next episode of our blog series, How to develop the digital maturity of your organisation and increase its market share.
