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Lucile Foucart, Sales Director and Alix Prudhon, Marketing Director at Contentsquare share their methods and advice to align Sales & Marketing teams.
61
min
Qlose is an interview format that meets the best experts in sales reps to find out how they contribute to their company's sales performance.
For this eighth episode, Qobra welcomes Lucile Foucart, Sales Director, and Alix Prudhon, Marketing Director France and Southern Europe at Contentsquare. In this episode, they'll be sharing their methods, advice and best practices for aligning your sales and marketing teams!
Lucile Foucart, Key Account Sales Manager at Contentsquare for the past 2 years. Before that, I spent 7 years at Salesforce, and before that, 7 years at Microsoft, always in sales reps.
Alix Prudhon, Marketing Director for France and Southern Europe at Contentsquare for 1 year, but I've been with Contentsquare since 2017. Before that, I worked for Maison & Objet for 4 years.
It's a fascinating topic, and one that we both love!
In our view, alignment between Sales and Marketing is first and foremost a shared vision of the business. These are two departments with business priorities that are defined and aligned with KPIs and objectives.
In practical terms, this means monitoring the life cycle of a lead, a meeting and a deal.
Secondly, alignment between Sales and Marketing is essential for three major topics:
Next, we need to define the stages in the process of achieving these three objectives.
The first stage will be devoted to defining the KPIs. When we talk about new contacts, the number of events, profitability, etc., we need to define the KPIs to be monitored to ensure the right synergy between the two teams. We need to define the KPIs to be monitored to ensure good synergy between the two teams.
Secondly, to ensure that there is a focus, a link between Marketing and Sales, and that there is genuine co-construction, communication is a key aspect!
Finally, the road map part is essential for anticipating and adapting our strategies according to the year, the priority industries, local events in each sector, etc. You need to be agile in certain areas, and so you need to co-construct the road map.
For example, we recently focused on the luxury goods industry, so we took part in events to do a bit of evangelism, wrote a chapter in the book Luxe and Digital and had LVMH speak at our last CX Circle event. Inevitably, the Sales and Marketing teams worked together to bring this strategy to fruition.
Preparation is the key to achieving perfect alignment between Sales and Marketing!
At Contentsquare, the hierarchy is fairly horizontal.
We're also big believers in rapid exchanges, and to achieve this we use Slack and very little email. This enables us to provide our sales reps with the speed of execution that is essential for pipeline management, deal closing and tracking difficulties.
At Contentsquare, face-to-face meetings are also a priority. It's essential to get the Sales and Marketing department working together in the same open space, speaking the same language and working as a single team. It's a great way to encourage exchange, mutual support and celebration!
The basis of a trading company is to have objectives to achieve.
At Contentsquare, these objectives are broken down into growth quotas and retention quotas. These two objectives are then broken down into more precise figures and quotas.
Then, the second type of KPI, which will drive the whole road map and the organization we are going to put in place behind it, is how to achieve it. In concrete terms, depending on the industry, we will have what we call pipe coverage that will enable us to meet these growth and retention objectives.
Depending on the space, there is a need for pipe coverage X2, X3, X4 depending on its maturity, history, growth, etc. in order to achieve the target set.
Each sales rep must therefore work with the marketing team to develop a strategy for achieving the necessary pipe coverage and reaching objectives. This involves the events to be organized, the objective (growth, retention), the type of contact to be reached, etc.
Then, depending on the stage at which each prospect progresses through the sales funnel, there is the whole strategy of influence that Marketing will have in association with the sales reps to move the deal forward to the next stage, right up to the signing of the contract.
When it comes to events, there is also a whole range of KPIs to monitor to ensure success. In addition to the target number of participants to be reached, there is the individualization of this objective by source of acquisition and by sales rep, so that everyone is involved in the events and their results. KPIs include the number of registrations, the number of no-shows, the number of Meetings at events, etc.
Finally, there's also the whole digital and content side, which is very important. We need to track and analyze all the content consumed by prospects and customers, and keep our sales reps up to date. You need to provide them with real-time, personalized monitoring of their customer portfolio. This is vital if you want to move a deal forward or relaunch it!
At Contentsquare, there are weekly meetings with all the sales reps, at which Marketing presents their key figures, as well as upcoming events, their various objectives, actions to be taken, etc.
Meetings are also held for each sales rep team, and depending on their schedule and future needs, specific marketing operations need to be worked on. For example, for the key account sales rep team, we need to work on more personalized gifts for the festive season, as they represent a much higher proportion of sales.
It is important to hold meetings by account size and/or by industry with members of the Marketing department, to work together on the trade fairs to be attended, the year's operations, and so on.
At Contentsquare, we also hold what we call a 'War Room' once a quarter. This is a cross-functional meeting that brings together the SDRs and Marketing to discuss a pre-defined theme.
In concrete terms, the aim is to work on an event, a project or content around this theme. For example, for the arrival of Christmas, the Marketing team brainstormed ideas for content before the War Room, while the SDR team identified the right contacts.
Then, in the "War room", we created campaigns with specific content that we sent to the contacts we had identified.
The "War room" system allows you to prepare and plan better, but also to get out of your routine, to create emulation and real cohesion between the Sales and Marketing teams.
The attribution of opportunities generated by marketing has evolved considerably over the last few years, and we've done a lot of 'test and learn'.
Firstly, we track all the activity in our CRM, all the marketing activities, whether it's downloading content, a request for a demo, contacts who have come to an event, and so on. Secondly, there's real collaboration with the SDR team, who deal with prospects, where each prospect's marketing activity is attached to and tracked by an SDR.
It's vital to have a single tool for tracking Marketing and Sales activity, as this makes communication and prospect development much easier. Everyone has access to the same data in real time, which is essential for keeping up to date with the latest activities of each contact.
The data can be used to justify certain choices and prove the ROI of marketing actions, so that the overall strategy can be adjusted over time.
This also avoids any friction within the teams, as the precise, in-depth data makes it possible to explain transparently why an event may or may not be repeated.
Firstly, at the beginning of the year, we need to provide all sales reps with a list of the events that are going to be organized during the year and those in which we are going to participate, as well as the reasons why.
Secondly, it's important to remember that sales reps are generated well before the start of the quarter, so it's always important to think ahead. By sharing all the events upstream, sales reps can see which events are most relevant to their prospects by theme, industry or account size. They can then get in touch with Marketing to take things further and personalize the event, for example by organizing a lunch or dinner following the event.
Each sales rep must make the events their own, depending on their customer and prospect base! After that, you need to give free rein to personalise the programme so that you can provide the best possible support to each sales rep, asking them what they would like to do, and adjusting the programme according to the budget available.
Often, as managers, we naturally carry out a whole series of tasks without realizing it, and we think that this is logical. However, we need to be able to list them and explain them to the sales reps so that they can reproduce them in turn and maximize the impact of a marketing event!
The first thing, whether before, during or after an event, is to adopt an open attitude. It's important to remember that most people who come to events don't know anyone.
Then, if you don't know what to do, you have to refer to your manager, to other people, watch how they behave, reproduce their actions and get into the same frame of mind. For example, the manager distributes the coffee to the guests, so don't ask questions. If someone else does something, don't hesitate to do the same.
At Contentsquare, we have standardized our communications to ensure that we have the best possible grasp of all the actions to be taken before an event. We have a lot of events, a lot of marketing activities, and our sales reps are fed a lot of things, so standardizing our communications is key.
In concrete terms, we created a document that we called "How to promote", which contains all the specific information for each event, with all the useful actions so that they can contact the right prospect, the right customer, create a dedicated personalized diary, etc.
This document is the same for everyone, it's just the name of the event and the information inside changes, but the structure is exactly the same. In this way, all year round, the sales reps know that they will have this reference document, which will be structured in the same way, with the precise information they need.
As mentioned above, for internal communication, we use Slack. Then, for our sales reps, we use Salesforce as our CRM.
To structure and standardise communication with sales reps, we use Monday. Sales reps can easily find everything they need, with all the information and details they need for each campaign and event.
We also have our content library on Airtable. Once again, to standardise communication and distribution, each piece of content has a Confluence page, with information about the content, the right link to share, etc., which is directly linked to Passfactory, our content consumption tracking tool, which is itself directly linked to Salesforce.
We update the Airtable and Confluence regularly, so we can make sure we're delivering fresh, up-to-date content.
It's important to only use tools that can be linked to the CRM, as this helps to align the Sales and Marketing teams!
We've also set up a Google calendar listing all the marketing events that sales reps have in their own calendar, so they can look at them at any time. This is often an opportunity to remember them and talk about them with customers and prospects.
The most important thing is to really focus on prospects and customers, and it's vital not to separate the Sales and Marketing teams to achieve this. You have to build together!
The aim is to focus on prospects and customers, to start from their needs and move forward, to co-construct something even more relevant.
You also need to ensure that both teams are aware of the road map, that they communicate with each other and that they are all involved.
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