You and your data center sales team need a strong grasp of product/market fit to improve your pipeline activity and results. Product/market fit describes how well products and services at the right price points fill market demand.
People do tons of research upfront before they are ready to engage with your sales team. You want to make sure you learn how the buyer’s journey has changed.
You also want to customize your approach based on where your prospects are and what your sales team has learned from looking at their lead intelligence. For instance:
- How they came to your site
- All the blog posts they read
- Videos they have engaged with
- Surveys they filled out
- Webinars they attended
- Videos they watched
If they are in the contact timeline for leads, it gives a tremendous amount of information your sales team can use to understand what will make that sales-qualified lead (SQL) get to the opportunity of closing.
For example, because you know your lead read six different things on VPNs and twelve things on PCI compliance, you know what to zero in on because you have a strong idea of their behavior on your site, implicitly, not just what they explicitly told you.
“Smarketing” and Data Center Sales Teams
Smarketing refers to the alignment of marketing and sales. Marketing and sales alignment is critical for determining the following:
- Who is qualified?
- Who is not qualified?
- When should leads be passed to sales?
These are all critical issues to look at to improve your pipeline and the results you are getting out of the bottom of it.
Most companies will end up with more granular deal stages than lead, opportunity, and client; this is something that is typically determined by:
- How buyer personas begin their journey
- How sales teams are structured
Closed-Loop Marketing That Improves Pipeline Forecasting
Closed-loop marketing is being able to tie your marketing activities to your sales outcome so you understand what is working well.
When you can determine what is working, you can do more of those successful marketing tactics. If you can analyze what is absolutely not working, you can stop those tactics and get smarter and smarter over time.
Closed-loop marketing and CRM integration are highly important.
How has your data center been able to improve pipeline activity? Let us know in the comments below.
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