In any organization, sales and marketing are the two most important functions for the business to grow, especially in the competitive financial industry for Singapore financial institutions. Even if your company has an awesome product, it would need a capable marketing team to build its brand and create marketing collateral before the salespeople can sell them effectively.

In the ideal situation, sales and marketing should work hand in hand but this is not always the case. Previously, I pointed out the three benefits of sales and marketing alignment but the question of how to do it remains open. In this article, we will look at three different methods of aligning sales and marketing.

1. Content Alignment 

In this information age, content is king. Once you get your content right, everything else will follow. Content starts from your company’s website to your brochure to your Facebook posts and YouTube videos. The key to content alignment begins when both sales and marketing come together to agree on a consistent message to be used across the company.

Content should be created to nurture prospects along the various stages of the sales funnel. There should be sufficient and relevant content for each stage and sales should understand the motivation of clients for reaching out to them. In the consideration stage, the materials would address a pain point and once sales know the pain points from the downloaded content, the sales representative would be more effective at selling their products.

Source: OnePage CRM

Such alignment will also prevent overwhelming the sales person from leads that are not ready to buy so that they would be more effective and trust the leads given by marketing. Marketing can cultivate leads to the decision stage by disseminating content through marketing software and tracking their effectiveness.

After a period of time, both departments should also conduct a content audit. The departments should check what materials are being used by the sales representative, if there is sufficient content at each stage of the funnel and the actual materials used by sales when they face the prospect. For the finance industry, it is also important to ensure that all marketing materials clear compliance. This is to prevent any misleading information being disseminated.

2. Lead Scoring Framework

For sales and marketing to be aligned, they have to on the same page on the quality of the lead. Lead scoring looks at the digital body behavior of a lead and checks if it fits your company’s ideal customer profile. The hardest part is come up with the right criteria to gauge the prospect’s qualification and interest level. 

For instance, if you are in the private banking space, qualified prospects should have at least $10 million of net worth and can put up $1 million worth of assets. Your ideal prospect would be between the age of 40 to 60, owns multiple businesses, have three children and are probably worried about wealth preservation. Such prospect would score highly in terms of qualification.

Then you look at their actual behaviour online. The prospect might end up downloading your white paper on the emerging market trends report, signs up for your seminar and visited your site three times in a week. All these are easily trackable with a decent CRM software and more points should be added for this prospect.

Source: CRM Search

For leads that are sales ready, marketing can qualify leads with grades of A, B, or C based on the points of the lead. There are external resources that can be used to enhance your scoring of these leads. Finally, there should be a review process to examine the effectiveness of these lead scoring.

3. Service Level Agreement (SLA)

To paraphrase Stephen Covey, one of the traits of an effective executive is to begin with the end in mind. The same principle applies for the setting of service level agreements. The end is clearly the sales quota and then we work backwards. Suppose one team of private bankers has a monthly sales quota of bringing in $1 million of new assets. Based on your existing marketing effort and sales funnel, marketing will qualify leads based on the lead scoring framework. Based on the activity of the lead, marketing would know the conversion rate and revenue which would be set on a table.

Source: Slideshare

Marketing would then commit to deliver 10 leads who takes the initiative to contact sales (worth $110,000), 200 whitepaper leads (worth $320,000), 100 webinar leads (worth $300,000), 100 online demo leads (worth $300,000) in a month to support the $1 million sales target. The Marketing SLA can be any combination of Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) for a sales cycle of 1 month. 

The Sales SLA would be based on the optimal time needed to contact a lead before it goes cold based on past experience. For instance, if a lead were to contact sales directly, it might indicate that the lead requires urgent service. Sales would commit to a 30 minute response time and to contact all 10 leads within a day. For whitepaper leads, they are still taking their time to consider and sales can commit to a SLA of 1 day response time.

So it is up to marketing and sales to plan their activities such that they can commit to the agreed SLA. There should also be periodic review of the actual SLA being achieved and based it according to the actual sales closed.

The Ultimate Alignment

Great organizations do not happen by chance. It takes careful planning and implementation. The alignment of sales and marketing should form the core of your business plan and they should be updated constantly.

Content alignment, lead scoring framework and SLA are the main engines which will align both departments which ultimately aligns with your customer’s demand and behaviour. Any organization that aligns themselves with their customer would be a great organization and sales will follow naturally.

What’s Next

Now that you know of the importance of aligning both the sales and marketing processes, you will have to take action. In the next article, we will detail the framework to make that alignment possible. Stay tuned.

We have often heard that the Singapore’s financial sector is highly competitive but nothing beats the facts.

A recent survey by leading management consultancy firm, Bain & Company, found that Singapore financial institutions and retail banks (e.g. DBS, OCBC, UOB) lose a staggering 40% of new products sales to agile competitors such as fintech start-ups who are better at digital marketing.

The survey found that 70% of respondents would switch financial service providers if it was easy for them to do so. For new entrants who are entering the local market or challengers who are seeking to upset the existing order (e.g. fund supermart which entered the securities brokerage business), this is an opportunity. For your company to grab a slice of the pie from willing consumers, your company must first create and ensure you have sales and marketing alignment between the two functional teams.

Sales and marketing teams are not naturally aligned as they have different objectives. The sales team are more focused on the short term such as closing sales to meet the monthly or quarterly sales target, while the marketing team is more interested in creating a positive brand image and generating leads for the sales team. Here are three reasons why you should align both your sales and marketing teams.

1. More effective sales team = less labour cost

The widespread availability of information over the Internet means that buyers are now more empowered. For instance, when a company is looking to invest their excess funds for a good return, they can easily search for a list of fund houses and compare their returns, cost, volatility and so on that meet their criteria.

When they are ready to buy, the sales cycle might be 30 days from the evaluation stage. The sales representative would need to interact with the clients that have the intention to purchase and not just interest. The sales representative would be frustrated when the client takes more than 30 days to respond as he can’t fulfill his sales target in time.

When the sales and marketing teams are aligned in today’s age, it means that marketing will agree to nurture the leads past the intent stage before passing the lead to the sales representative. By recognizing that 70% of the sales lead are not ready to buy yet in the buyer’s journey and passing on the remaining 30% who are ready to buy, the organization becomes more effective at sales. This means that your organization would require less salesperson to hit the same sales target or more.

2. Responding to buyer’s demand & not crossing the regulatory line

Singapore is famed for its strict financial regulation which provides peace of mind to investors and safeguard its sterling reputation as a financial hub. While there is significant money to be made, there are also risks involved in the process. For an organisation to be effective, it's products must meet the customer’s demand and the sales person who is talking to the customer on the ground is most exposed to it.

When marketing and sales are aligned, the marketing department would know which of its products have more demand. Then marketing can craft the right message on its advertising materials to reach out to other customers who have similar needs. On the other side, marketing can help spot if the sales person is crossing the regulatory line in their eagerness to close the sales.

Source: Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS)

In Singapore, the marketing collateral has to be approved by both the internal compliance team which have in depth understanding of the MAS regulation. Therefore the marketing team can flag any potential troubles and prevent civil and criminal liabilities falling on the company and individual sales person.

3. Get 208% More Sales

As companies learn to skip the vast majority of buyers who are not ready to buy, they can focus their limited time and energy on the buyers which are ready to buy. The sales person who is focused on closing the deals can’t read their prospect’s mind on their intent level. Only the marketing department which can do lead scoring (will be discussed in next article) will be able to do so.

Source: Slideshare

If the marketing department consistently provide weak prospects to their sales person, they will learn to ignore the leads provided by them. However, the marketing department can continue to nurture the lead such that they are ready and studies would then suggest approaching the vendor after 57% of the buying process is complete. By 2020, buyers will approach the sellers after 80% of the buying process is complete. Research by MarketingProf showed that companies with aligned sales would increase their revenue by more than 208%.

What’s Next

Now that you know of the importance of aligning both the sales and marketing processes, you will have to take action. In the next article, we will detail the possible actions to make that alignment possible. Stay tuned.

Cultural awareness is taken for granted these days. In Singapore, our society is largely influenced by Western media with similar dressing and infrastructure. Still there are differences in values in Singapore which forms our unique culture. Culture is a major topic but this article attempt to distill and present a easy to digest form for the busy business executive.

Culture is the invisible bond which ties people together and forms the basis for their attitudes and pattern of behaviour. For businesses, an important point to note is that culture affects perception and perception is reality for most people. Our perception of whether something is good or bad, easy or difficult, depends on our attitude and structure of thinking.

Such perceptions are especially important to industries that are built on trust such as banking and financial services. There is nothing more intimate as far as finances are concerned. For clients to entrust you with significant amount of money, they will have to share aspects of their life which they don’t share even with their family members.

Recent Context Highlights The Extra Need For Cultural Awareness
This is in the context of weakening employment growth in Singapore in recent years which led to a decline in foreign workers for the first time in 6 years.

Source: Singapore's Ministry of Manpower

If you have read our earlier articles about the importance of standing out and crafting an effective market message, one key question would have stood out; how can I bring these astonishing results to my financial institution as the Chief Marketing Officer? Every financial institution is unique in its own way. You have to deal with your own strengths and challenges.

While every financial institution is different, they have three common components: people, process and system. Regardless of which vertical you occupy, you will need marketing people to craft the message and sales people to deliver them. There has to be an agreed process of doing, whether it is done formally or informally. Finally, there has to be a system where customers' information are captured and utilized.

If you can tune these three components properly, sales would naturally hit a new high under your leadership. In the following section, we will go into just one area for each of the three components. 

People Challenge
In any small or medium sized organization, it is a challenge to find and retain talents. You start by recruiting a young talent whose skills are unpolished. After two years of painstaking nurture and guidance, he is now the star performer. Attractive offers start to pour in from external companies and within three months, your talent is gone. This is especially true for sales and marketing professionals.

Their work requires them to be out and about with frequent interactions with suppliers and clients. If they are good, they don’t even need to search for a new job. Whenever a good sales person leaves the company, the company will have to spend significant time and resources to hire a new sales person.

According to UK’s leading recruitment consultancy, for the average sales person on a $70,000 annual wage, the cost of hiring is a massive $170,000 if you consider both one-off recruitment and training costs and the recurring cost such as salary and benefits.