Connect Sales & Marketing: Building Your B2B SaaS Demand Gen Waterfall
If you’ve ever worked alongside either a sales or marketing team, you likely already know that they don’t often see eye to eye. Marketing frequently gets siloed into their lead generation efforts while sales often feels confident that they have the biggest impact on those leads turning into paying customers.
The unfortunate reality of this scenario is that one of the most impactful relationships affecting the buyer journey is the one between sales and marketing. While they often operate independently, they are designed to work most effectively as one cohesive unit.
The Disconnect Between B2B SaaS Sales and Marketing
Why is there often this huge disconnect between sales and marketing teams, especially in B2B SaaS startups? Marketing is often tasked with driving demand in the form of leads while sales is responsible for building relationships with those leads and turning them into life-long customers.
Because these activities are part of different stages of the lead lifecycle, they often disjoint themselves. Marketing will build the strategy that takes a lead from nothing to the awareness phase. Then that lead gets passed off to the sales team who will take them through the consideration and decision phases.
This isn’t the way things should work though. Sales can offer considerable value during the awareness phase while marketing can actively support sales in the consideration and decision stages. Let’s look at how.
Awareness: Understanding the Problems of Your B2B SaaS Leads
During the awareness phase of the buyer lifecycle, your target market is often just starting to understand their true problems and seeking out solutions for them. This is the stage in which you might capture some interest through a Google Search, a click on an advertisement, or a visit to your website. It’s no surprise this is why marketing is such a big part of this stage.
But how can sales support this stage? If marketing teams can regularly connect with their sales counterparts, an important information share can take place. Sales has unique insight about customer pain points because they spend most of their time speaking directly to customers about just that. This gives valuable insight to the marketing team to supplement their customer research, and allows them to speak to their target audience in their unique language. Without that sales input, much more testing needs to be done.
Consideration: Supporting SaaS Sales Efforts from the Beginning
Once a prospect moves into the consideration stage, sales usually jumps in to walk them through why your B2B SaaS company’s solution is the right one for their problems and needs. They often understand their prospect’s businesses intimately and can recommend exactly the right solution as compared to their competitors.
If you’re thinking that marketing has a lot of secret weapons that can be thrown to sales during this stage of the buyer journey, you’d be right.
If marketing can gather more intel about the unique needs of their buyer personas, they can create content that speaks to those unique industries or problems during the awareness stage, moving prospects to consideration more quickly. This could include informative webinars, research-backed whitepapers or blogs tailored to specific buyer personas.
Decision: Empowering Sales to Do What They Do Best
When it comes to the final stage of the buyer journey, decision making, sales works to overcome the objections of their prospects and smoothly move them into the process of working with your B2B SaaS company.
Marketing teams often have the wordsmithing capabilities to create materials that help sales to overcome common objections long before a prospect even brings them up. But too often marketing isn’t privy to this very specific language used with sales in the decision-making process.
If marketing can create more tailored content that is available to prospects during the awareness and consideration phases, sales may have less objections to field during sales discussions.
Connecting B2B Sales and Marketing
Marketing materials should always support every stage of the buying process to actually help make the job of the sales team easier and faster. This disconnect often happens due to sales and marketing being siloed parts of the organization and not communicating well together. If sales and marketing can collaborate better, marketing can support the goals of sales earlier in the buyer journey while the job of the sales team becomes easier.
Book a 30-minute consultation with our B2B SaaS GTM experts to learn the strategies to better connect your sales and marketing teams.
