Align Your Marketing and Sales Team Better With Revenue Marketing

The effort to align sales and marketing has long been underway. In its most recent iteration, the marketing model known as revenue marketing aims to seal the final revenue-leaking gaps between sales and marketing through closed-loop data feedback and automation.

What Is the Revenue Marketing Model?

Revenue marketing is a philosophy and strategy that aims to align both the sales and marketing teams and make revenue generation a joint core objective. This approach means that all activities undertaken by the two teams are geared toward the same goal.

Unlike traditional marketing models, revenue marketing means that the two teams support each other every step of the way to achieve revenue goals rather than operating in silos.

Chart showing the revenue marketing journey
Source: The Pedowitz GroupOpens a new window

The best way to understand revenue marketing is to think of the sales funnel: awareness, interest, desire, action. Marketing traditionally sits at the top two tiers of that funnel, generating brand awareness and providing lots of leads for the sales team to chase. More advanced marketing models might also include creating supportive sales enablement content by marketing for all stages of the sales funnel.

See More: 5 Principles for Sales Enablement Success — According to B2B Decision-Makers

Revenue marketing, on the other hand, ensures that all the following elements are aligned, shared, and continuously fed back between the two teams:

• Objectives
• Activities
• Data
• Operations
• Technology

Revenue marketing means that both teams shoulder the responsibility for building a sustainable revenue generation model within the business.

Benefits of a Revenue Marketing Approach

At its core, the main benefit of revenue marketing is that it increases revenue and makes organizations more profitable. In fact, one reportOpens a new window found that creating close alignment between sales and marketing can increase revenue by a whopping 209%.

Other benefits of revenue marketing include:

• Acceleration of the prospect’s journey through the sales funnel, shortening the lifecycle of your deals and speeding up revenue growth
• Providing leads and opportunities to the sales team that are ready to purchase
• Gaining predictable revenue models with relevant KPIs for both the marketing and sales team

Importance of Technology and Automation in Revenue Marketing

Whether they’re calling it revenue marketing or not, many of today’s sales and marketing teams are working on getting to this level of revenue predictability. You can see it in the rise of terminology such as “RevOpsOpens a new window .” Sales and marketing teams are no longer working in silos, but revenue marketing is the final building block in sustainable and predictable revenue growth.

Without integrated technology and automation across the two departments, you’ll never achieve the closed-loop feedback between sales and marketing data and operations needed to make revenue marketing work.

Technology has advanced rapidly in recent years to provide automation across key sales and marketing activities. Acquiring and integrating these technologies in your organization enables revenue accelerating activities such as:

• Gaining a deeper and data-driven understanding of your target markets and their buying preferences
• Automation of revenue accelerating activities, e.g., drip email campaigns
• Provide sales executives with data and context to close deals faster
• Take the right sales and marketing actions at the right times
• Identify purchase-ready leads vs. those who need more time, so the sales team focus their efforts on quicker revenue acquisition
• Keep clean, relevant data flowing into your CRM and sales automation tools and back into your marketing automation platform
• Develop models specific to your organization that predict revenue growth and help you to scale revenue-driving activities

With that in mind, here are the core pieces of technology needed for revenue marketing and how to optimize them.

Martech

Almost as soon as internet usage became mainstream, marketers began acquiring technology to help them build, manage and eventually automate a lot of their digital marketing campaigns. Now, marketing automation platforms have advanced even further to help both B2B and B2C marketers understand their target audience, monitor the success of their campaigns, test campaign elements, and personalize their messaging.

Martech covers a broad range of marketing software, including:

• Website management and analytics
• Email marketing
• Social media posting and analytics
• Paid advertising management platforms
• A/B testing
• Marketing automation

In an ideal world, you’ll find software and tools that incorporate as many activities as possible in one platform. That way, you can interlink different elements of your marketing program and easily track the activities of leads across campaigns.

CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is the cornerstone of modern sales and marketing technology. CRMs enable you to:

• Manage the lifecycle of a deal from lead to close
• Maintain visibility into the current pipeline
• Record and maintain important account information to help sales progress the deal
• Recording interactions between leads and prospects with the company, from scheduled meetings to digital activity
• Pull reports and insighs to understand performance and inform the ongoing sales strategy

Sales automation

No matter how purchase-ready your leads are, many sales teams still need to undertake a laundry list of processes and admin to effectively progress and close deals. Sales automation helps the sales team to automate these tasks, including:

• Collating contact information automatically
• Automating meeting scheduling
• Automating cold email outreach and drip campaigns
• Analytics on the performance of all the above

In conjunction with a CRM and data from marketing automation tools, sales automation platforms ensure you’re hitting prospects with the right messaging at the right time.

See More: AI for Sales: Empowering Professionals With Tools To Stay Prepared

Integration

All these technologies are useful in their own right. But, operating individually, they still only help the marketing and sales teams separately. Revenue marketing is about integrating these tools, data, processes, and operations so that both teams are fully informed and support revenue growth acceleration at all times.

With revenue marketing that aligns sales and marketing activities, integration between systems is the key to enabling a flow of data and collaboration along all points of the sales funnel. Integrating marketing, sales, and automation technology enables your teams to:

• Generate marketing materials and campaigns that support the path to purchase throughout the entire sales funnel
• Pinpoint bottlenecks in your pipeline that are slowing down the time-to-close for your deals
• Maintain a holistic picture of your revenue growth and opportunities to accelerate it
• Create a predictable and sustainable revenue stream for your business

Final Thoughts

Your sales and marketing platforms and automation tools do a lot for your teams. But revenue marketing is about ensuring that all this technology comes together to do a lot for your business growth and revenue goals.