Pharma Sales and Marketing Alignment
Bridging the alignment gap between sales and marketing in B2B pharma.
A LinkedIn and CMI report found that 46% of marketers describe sales and marketing as “highly aligned” at their organisation. As for the other 54%, you can expect to see a lot of commercial waste, as well as opportunities gone by the wayside. There are often reasons for this misalignment, and an InsideView survey reported the six biggest obstacles for marketing and sales as:
Lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects (43%)
Communication (43%)
Use of different metrics (41%)
Broken/flawed processes (37%)
Lack of accountability on both sides (25%)
Reporting challenges (21%)
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Briefly think about your organisation or some of the pharma organisations you have worked at previously. Were the marketing and sales teams aligned? I imagine the answer was not a definitive yes. This is a real shame because it is likely that that organisation did not operate commercially to its fullest potential.
By developing a single vision for sales and marketing, pharma organisations can experience a range of benefits such as decreased costs, enhance the effectiveness and of sales and marketing tactics and measure performance. Perhaps more importantly, they can become more efficient during uncertain times.
This post will help bridge the gap between sales and marketing in B2B pharma with a number of approaches designed to make you more aligned.
11 APPROACHES FOR SALES AND MARKETING ALIGNMENT IN B2B PHARMA
Here are eleven approaches and ideas to help bring the marketing and sales departments together in B2B pharma.
1. SET UP REGULAR MEETINGS AND ENCOURAGE COLLABORATION
Misalignment often occurs when communication between departments and staff are not frequent. Weekly calls are advised to keep everyone updated on developments from the previous week - and weekly meetings or informal catch-ups are advised not just for updates, but to maintain harmony within the commercial team. Any issues that may arise, can usually be solved through communication and collaboration - and time zones and geographical dispersion should not be an issue for meetings in 2020.
Mergers and acquisitions are common in pharma, which leads to team members with different skills, mindsets, and ways of doing things that often come together and are forced to work together. Regular meetings can help bring the two organisations together, just like they would if time zones mean that people in different locations are not actually at their desks at the same time.
2. BUYER PERSONAS CONSISTENT FOR SALES AND MARKETING
What does your target audience look like? If marketing and sales answer differently to this question, then you have a serious problem. In the pharma and related industries, due to its complexities, it's more important than ever to segment audiences to create stronger commercial campaigns - and sales and marketing need to work towards the same buyer persona.
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers that help visualise the ideal customer you’re trying to attract. It is a research-based profile that depicts a target customer, based on current customers. Buyer personas generally ensure that all marketing activities are aligned and striving towards the same goals. If sales are also working from the same buyer personas, it would suggest that both are explicitly chasing the same ideal customer which is required for alignment.
3. WORK FROM THE SAME CRM SYSTEM
A common pitfall in B2B is the management of customer data. Often, marketing and sales will manage separate sets of data. Marketers will use marketing systems that have built-in CRM capabilities, and sales will use an Excel spreadsheet stored on the user’s desktop. (If this is your organisation you need to address this right away!)
It may be the case that the organisation is technologically immature, and such processes are a result of bad planning. In other cases, this is a result of previous data ownership issues where disagreements around who owns the data collected exist. A shared CRM system is the solution where data is transparent between departments. And don’t worry sales, a shared CRM system can still attribute leads to you and your sales efforts… it just gives marketing more visibility with the goal of helping you convert that lead into a client. You can also access the leads that they have developed for you.
PharmaVOICE expands on this: “The success of CRM initiatives depends on the implementation and the planning that goes into them. Any CRM system requires a lot of input from both sales and marketing when being developed so that it can be used easily by the end-users on both sides. The system must be able to capture the information that is going to be important and needed by someone on the sales management team and the marketing management team.”
4. WORK ON YOUR PHARMA PIPELINE TOGETHER
The investment pharma organisations make in marketing materials - from research through to design - is often large. Often, the materials themselves are created for the use of sales, perhaps even request by sales to help the conversion process during key pipeline stages. But sometimes the material just isn’t used or used as intended. Pipeline collaboration (effective balancing of priorities, clear two-way communications and effective coordination) eradicates this and ensures that marketing can help sales bring new customers/projects into the pharma organisation by conducting the necessary marketing actives.
Siloed pipelines create all kinds of issues such as inappropriate frequency of marketing communications with misaligned metrics and a lack of understanding or appreciation for each other’s real-world opportunities and challenges. Working on the same pipelines ensures that sales and marketing agree on what is most important, meaning they can work together with focus.
5. CLOSED-LOOP MARKETING
Closed-loop marketing is a form of marketing that relies on data and insights. Simply put, “closing the loop” means that sales teams report to marketing about what happened to the leads they receive, which helps marketers understand their best and worst lead sources. Essentially, we are looking to introduce data from the last touchpoint with sales, to inform campaigns for future first touchpoints with marketing. This is potentially another addition to the sales and marketing meeting agenda.
Closed-loop marketing will show you how your customers found your organisation. It tracks their journey from the first time they visited your website to their final customer conversion, which then forms the basis for the next customer’s journey. It’s the practice of compiling large quantities of data into easy-to-consume reports that profile your organisation’s customers. This process can be fully automated through automation software or can be tracked with a well-maintained CRM.
6. ENCOURAGE SALES TO DISTRIBUTE FEEDBACK SURVEYS
Market research is hugely valuable for any organisation as it often uncovers truths about markets and the customers within. But such research can only offer so much insight. Another source of insight is from the sales department, who have had face-to-face interactions with HCPs and decision-makers, and are generally more representative of the market. Such direct responses, reactions, and feedback from the field can hold the key to client needs and wants where marketing can form messages accordingly.
Sales can distribute (and help shape) feedback surveys to help the marketing proposition - it may be that such surveys are not required as the sales team will have a body of data on prospects which marketing can use right away.
7. IDENTIFY THE FRICTION POINTS
Sujan Patel suggests that identifying friction points in the sales funnel can help marketing and sales alignment:
“Ask both teams to describe the sales funnel. Then, make a point of establishing a canonical (i.e. correct and final) version. Ensure that each team understands their role in the funnel and which stages they are responsible for within it. Next, ask both teams to discuss what friction points they’ve encountered in the funnel. Which parts of it (if any) aren’t working as effectively as they could be? Likely friction points might include: A lack of IQLs (information qualified leads), SGLs (sales qualified leads) or MQLs (marketing qualified leads).”
“You can only tackle these friction points once you know what they are, and you can tackle them most effectively when all parties responsible for creating and converting leads are involved. Now that you know where your biggest points of friction are in getting leads, converting them, and keeping your customers, you need to decide on the best ways to reduce that friction.”
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8. MARKETERS COULD ACCOMPANY SALES WHEN VISITING PROSPECTS OR CONDUCTING CALLS
More often than not, sales managers can spend an entire career working within pharma - he or she will know the industry, market and decision-makers within. Marketers, however, are more inclined to move from sector to sector, meaning that sales hold the relationships and therefore the power, not to mention the experience, within the commercial department. For alignment, it would certainly help the marketer if sales can expose the marketer to the environments he or she is exposed to.
Involving marketing (especially new marketing managers) in site visits and sales/prospecting calls can help bring the marketer up to speed with sales, which will also provide valuable insights about behaviours and provide a single view of the customer. The average tenure of marketing managers in pharma may also be shorter, meaning that an organisation could value the role of marketing more. Doing this will certainly help long-term.
9. IF THEY HAVE THE TIME, GET SALES INVOLVED IN CONTENT CREATION
You know the situation: Sales complaining about insufficient marketing activity and materials, information that is not for use in real life and communications/messaging that is too rigid. And if this is true, you as the marketer, are at fault. What you need to resolve the situation is to create marketing material that sales know will help them do their jobs, and bring more customers to the organisation or the organisation’s product offering.
Sales may, at first, be reluctant to do this. But in reality, doing so will only help sales make more sales meaning it is a task worth pushing through. And if sales have contributed to the creation of marketing materials which he or she will use, there is no room for complaining. So, why not get sales involved in the creation of marketing content or have them manage social media platforms for a week?
10. LEAVE EGOS AT THE DOOR
Another common situation is where the head of marketing and the head of sales has experienced so much friction - either between them or in previous roles - that they cannot see eye-to-eye. Both are leading departments, and both have created a divide between those departments because of personal issues. Because of the egos. Unfortunately, we have encountered pharma organisations with such bad relationships that make running lead generation and nurturing marketing campaigns difficult.
Egos need to be left at the door, otherwise, the marketing output will be affected, as well as sales results. Two-way communications are vital between sales and marketing. If there is an unprofessional rivalry present, something has to change or your organisation will not realise its full commercial potential. If both departments will continue to clash, perhaps a commercial head to bridge the two is the only solution.
11. JOINT COMPENSATION AND INCENTIVES
One of the areas where issues arise between marketing and sales is remuneration, specifically financial commission/reward on new customers and clients. If performance metrics as such differ between departments who are working towards the same goal, you will find tension due to the differences in opinions in terms of attribution and influence on that sale. This is a difficult one to address, not only due to the fact that the level of seniority between the marketing or sales professional might differ but due to traditional HR practices that pharma organisations might be adopting. If compensation, incentives and rewards between both parties can be mutually agreed, upon and are equal, you may have a happier and more motivated commercial team.
ENCOURAGING SALES AND MARKETING ALIGNMENT
Sales and marketing are usually both working towards the same objectives. (In rare cases, they don’t even do this!) But it is common that how they work towards those objectives are completely different. The eleven approaches within this post help bring sales and marketing departments together in B2B pharma once and for all.
Once both departments are aligned, you will start to see results as your commercial machines become more robust and efficient. HubSpot state that you’ll experience a 38% higher win rate and 36% better customer retention if both sales and marketing are aligned. Now is the time for you, the marketer or salesperson, to lead the collaboration between your sister department and show your boss the inevitable increase in marketing and sales performance for doing so.
For more on strategic marketing approaches in the pharmaceutical sectors, and how we can help you, visit our section on strategy.