Opportunity-Based Marketing Strategy: Aligning with Sales for Faster B2B Deals

A great opportunity-based marketing (OBM) strategy will help your team align with Sales and close B2B deals faster. We’ve covered a lot so far in our OBM blog series, from managing leads to opportunity segmentation in Salesforce. These steps provide a foundation for making adjustments as buying committees evolve along with their technology requirements and budget constraints.

This is why it’s essential to be in lockstep with Sales during the entire buying process. Strong communication is key to implementing a successful OBM strategy. Communication ensures your revenue teams are aligned and well-organized to stay ahead of competitors and successfully close deals. 

Let’s take a look at three keys to effective strategic communication with Sales in your opportunity-based marketing strategy. 

Tip 1: Help all teams get value from the data you have

All customer data is important, but its value differs depending on the team. Performance data helps marketing adjust how they deliver content, while opportunity and pipeline data aligns with sellers goals. Sellers in particular want to know the effectiveness of a campaign in terms of opportunity generation or activities that influence the closing of deals. 

A holistic lead to opportunity process will help both sales and marketing teams have a cohesive view of the entire process while also being able to dive deeper into the data that is of specific interest to them. For example, while marketing may want to dive deeper into the lead journey and all the campaign touchpoints, Sales will care more about the trends and contributors to accelerate the buying journey. 

The beauty is that all Marketing Cloud Account Engagement data, such as email opens, click-through rates (CTRs), link conversions, and Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is also available in Sales Cloud, so you can put marketing and sales data points together allowing both teams to better understand how marketing activities directly impact sales pipeline and revenue. This enables both marketing and sales teams to get what they need and work together. 

Tip 2: Be mindful about lead alerts and notifications 

Let Sales know what notifications they can expect and why. Give actionable insights within these notifications to help with follow-ups. Your marketing team should be collaborating with sales on which actions are meaningful from the start and then working with them to understand the expectations, follow-up actions. 

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement allows Sales to customize their own alerts. They can favorite accounts or contacts that instantly notify  them when there’s marketing engagement. They can also determine the exact engagement they want to know about, from website visits to form completions. 

Tip 3: Do regular lead reviews with your Sales team 

Marketing should lead the discussion on optimizing campaigns. Develop dashboards or add reports onto existing Sales dashboards to give them visibility into how leads are engaging with campaigns. Remember to narrow it down to the type of leads they care about most. Maybe it’s their top accounts or a particular industry vertical. They can look at the reports at any time to stay informed and review them with the marketing team on a monthly basis. 

During check-ins, keep notes on what Sales says isn’t worth their time or will never convert. Pay attention to how they talk about accounts and opportunities, as this will help you generate higher-quality leads. This is also a great time to provide Sales with more nurture and outreach tools such as engagement emails. These emails are created in Account Engagement and made available in Sales Cloud to use as part of outreach efforts. 

Strong communication between your marketing and sales team will elevate your opportunity-based marketing strategy, close more deals, and boost overall collaboration of your internal teams. Like many things in life, success relies on good organization, strong communication and teamwork, and putting yourself in a position to succeed when the opportunity is right. I hope this blog series helps you set a foundation. Good luck on your journey!