Grow sales with revenue-focused marketing

In this webinar, Tom Dean sits down with Daniel Wikberg to discuss how to grow your sales with revenue-focused marketing.

Here, you will learn about the importance of sales and marketing alignment, as well as which common traps to avoid along the way.

Top Three Takeaways

• Communication between sales and marketing teams is crucial to ensure goal and objective alignment and the best chance of success with revenue-focused marketing strategies.
• It’s very easy to increase your number of “leads”, but often these people aren’t real prospects for your business.
• You shouldn’t identify your target customer using marketing data, and you shouldn’t do it using sales data. You should do it using both.

The importance of sales and marketing alignment

Before diving into revenue-focused marketing efforts, Daniel was keen to discuss the importance of sales and marketing alignment. 

“From my experience, most of the information online about this subject is not that practical,” Daniel explains. “There are lots of exciting thoughts and ideas, but they are usually very tricky to put into action.”

Daniel puts this down to the advice, often focusing on large eCommerce businesses and not on what works for startups on small B2B businesses.

“If you visit a company where sales and marketing are not aligned, you have two problems,” he explains. “You have little to no feedback from sales to marketing on what’s working and what isn’t, and marketing tends to be too focused on quantity over quality.”

Lots of leads, but not enough appointments?

Daniel also explains that lots of leads do not mean lots of prospects, noting that this is an issue that Upsales has also experienced in the past.

“We got tons of emails from people downloading our free eBook, but most of them weren’t even real leads,” he admits.

Instead, they became more exclusive in their marketing channels, and the quality of leads became much greater, with more true prospects rising to the top of the pile.

By being more targeted in their approach, the cost per lead increased, but so too did the revenue.

Identifying your ideal target market

When identifying your perfect target audience, Daniel stresses the importance of using both marketing and sales data. This can be achieved by ensuring the two teams are more aligned and providing each other with weekly feedback through in-person meetings or calls.

More revenue from fewer meetings ensures that your marketing team will be more focused on tracking highly targeted real-time data, your sales team gains specialization in working with decision-makers, and you can provide much higher sales revenue per person in your team.

Focusing on the wins

When doing your performance analysis, Daniel explains that it is easy to get caught up focusing on the averages or what isn’t working and trying to fix it.

However, he recommends looking at things slightly differently, focusing more on the wins you have. 

“You will gain the most insight from the deals you win,” Daniel explains. 

If you want to create a standard of what works and what is a success, look at what is working and what is successful.

Creating a well-oiled outbound machine

Now, Upsales spends much less on its cost per lead than in previous years, thanks to its combined approach of email outreach and LinkedIn messages and advertisements sent to a highly targeted list.

“The benefit of having a highly targetted list is that even if you wanted to spend a million on advertising, you can’t because you only have a list of a thousand companies to target,” Daniel explains.

Both Tom and Daniel agree that while many companies would rather not have to do outbound calls and messages, it is necessary for success.

How to measure your results

When it comes to measuring performance, Daniel always strives to keep things simple. “There is so much talk about attribution, CAC, and lifetime value, but in my opinion, most of this is built for eCommerce marketing, so it’s not that useful for B2B companies,” Daniel explains. “At Upsales, we keep it really simple. We have something called COSM, which is the cost of sales marketing, where we add together the salaries of the sales and marketing teams and all the money we spend on ads and creative agencies. Then we compare that with revenue generated from clients to see if what we are doing is working or not.”