SCORRCAST Short | Marketing & Business Development Synergy

Explore the powerful synergy between marketing and business development in this SCORRCAST Short. Discover how aligning these functions can drive growth, improve client engagement, and create cohesive strategies that deliver results. Learn practical tips for fostering collaboration and maximizing the impact of your marketing and business development efforts.

Transcript

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Now everyone knows that I am a broken record on the relationship between marketing and business development. This relationship has to have synergy. It has to have communication and collaboration. When marketing and business development fail, there is often a silo between those two teams, and so that's why I'm really excited for today's episode of The SCORR cast. It's a shorter one. It features myself and Tess Dugan from the SCORR team, going back and forth about three key things that you can do to shore up the relationship between marketing and business development and see more success with those teams allow you to reach your goals and frankly, take the tension and the pain out of working together. It doesn't have to be that difficult. Enjoy this episode. we're here to talk about how you can better build this synergy between your marketing and business development teams. And Alf and I have a few best practices that we'd like to share. We really view this as one of the most important aspects of being on a marketing team or a business development team, and there are some tricks of the trade that will make this relationship and your life a lot easier. Tess, I'm going to let you go ahead and get started with tip number one. The first thing is to really establish your buyer's journey. And to do that, you want to ensure that marketing and business development have the same viewpoint of who your buyer is. So make sure that you work collaboratively to develop your ideal client profile, to make sure that everyone's aligned before you even start talking about what that journey of a client looks like. Then once you get into really building out every step of that process, make sure you do it very detailed. Think about the first interaction that a potential client has with your organization, the first time they convert. How you qualify a marketing qualified lead, when business development has a capabilities presentation all the way through to really, when you have that individual as a client, and you're continuing to communicate with them to try and bring in even more business. Yeah. Tess, I think this is so important as the number one tip that we have, because every single touch point is going to be different. And when a customer is at the end of their buyer cycle and they become a client, that's going to be a lot different than if they're at the very first stage where they don't even know about your organization or your business, and they're just getting started with you. And so I think it's so important that we recognize that each of those touch points is different, and we have to have those built out within this journey, right? And when you talk about those touch points, it's really important to make sure that everyone has a detailed understanding of the definition you want marketing and sales to be speaking the same language. You both want to know exactly what the definition of an MQL is of an SQL and so on and so forth, which is a perfect segue to goal or tip number two here within your teams, which is that you have to buy in and have a true understanding of both your goals as a marketing individual and team and the business development team, where you start to have those silos and you say, Hey, listen, we're responsible for this, but we don't know what BD or what marketing responsible for. That's where you start to have that disconnect and a little bit of that friction or tension between teams, and so it's really important that when you get those goals, whether that's directly from the business goals down, or if you're just setting up new marketing goals for an individual tactic or for a quarterly campaign, it's so important that you have that understanding and that you're bought into what your goals are, and you're bought into what the other team's goals are as well. That makes a lot of sense. Alec, what would your advice be for an organization that maybe hasn't gone through this process before and is feeling a little lost, and hey, how do I start by setting up my goals for this first year? Well, I think you asked a great question here, and it's one that we get all the time. And I think there's a couple of different answers. The first is to watch this video with you and i The second is to reach out to SCORR, because we can certainly help with that. But the more direct answer is to really take a granular look at the business goals. You have to start from the very top. If you're doing things in a silo, that's where you're going to lose. And so what I always recommend is taking a look at your business goals and understanding what the true metrics are that you need to in order to be successful in the year 2022 or the year 2023 so maybe that goal is we need to grow this business unit by 10% or we want to close 10 clients. Well. In order to close 10 clients, we need to have 500 marketing qualified leads. In order to close those 10, those 500 qualified marketing leads need to result in 100 sales qualified leads and so on down the line as you work through this, if this is your first time, there are going to be some numbers that you have to throw out in order to try to set as benchmarks. And over that 369, 12 month period, you'll start to get some of that raw data that will allow you to say, okay, for every 10 MQLs, that turns into three SQL and it turns into one proposal opportunity, or one pitch or one close. And so I think it's really having a granular understanding of where all of that is, both on your team, the BD team, and what that means for the business as a whole. That makes a lot of sense, and leads us into our third recommendation, which is really around discipline communication. And I know it sounds obvious to say you need to communicate between the teams, but from where I sit, this is where we most often see the breakdown between marketing and business development, because it's more standard that those teams are really working together at the beginning of the year, where we're going through business planning and and you have great momentum, and you're building out a strategic plan and a buyer's journey, and then it's everyone go And from there, if you don't continue to have those conversations, you won't continue to be successful, because we all know that these approaches have to be refined as your client base changes as your business changes, and so it's really important to make sure that you choose a cadence that works well for your organization when you're thinking about ongoing communication. So maybe you meet monthly, and you can talk about both the successes that the teams have had and any opportunities for improvement. Gosh, I know you said it. I know communication is that, just like catch all that you throw out there, but it is so important when marketing and BD work in silos, that's where you fail, whether it's the full year campaign, or it's individual tactic that you're trying. If there's not alignment and communication on those two items, that's where you're not going to see success, and that's when you start to get frustrated. And I don't think it has to be frustrating, right? I think it's really important. There's any takeaway from this video test for me, it's that business development and marketing can work really well together, and it doesn't have to be a struggle like it can be if you don't have that transparent communication, if you don't know when and what each individual team is working on and things of that nature. Yeah, and I really like the word transparency that you use, because ultimately, both marketing and business development are very agile teams. We are those creative people that are always thinking about the next new way to execute something or the next new tactic to try. But in order to make that strategic, we need to have an understanding holistically, as a commercial department, what is working well for our business today, and where do we have the opportunity to kind of mix something up that's not working well and try something now, I couldn't have said it, but said it better myself, and transparent, transparently. I don't think there's anything that I can say that would top that. So with that being said for test for Alec, that's all from SCORR marketing, and I'm sure we'll be talking to you soon. As always, thank you for tuning in to this episode of The SCORRcast, brought to you by SCORR marketing. We appreciate your time and hope you found this discussion insightful. Don't forget to subscribe and join us for our next episode. Until then, remember, marketing is supposed to be fun.