To get started, take a look at how these five factors may be impacting your company’s ability to meet its growth goals:
1. Lack of visibility
If there’s one thing your marketing strategy needs more of, it’s data. With new CRM capabilities, sales and marketing teams in every industry gain unprecedented access to the nuts and bolts of their pipeline activity. These platforms deliver a complete set of data about which prospect is engaging with which campaign on which platform. Without an in-depth understanding of what drives your overall marketing and sales performance, you set your team up for failure. If you don’t already use a CRM and Marketing Automation platform (or don’t use them properly), focus your efforts on strengthening visibility into your sales process. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, so be sure you can measure the sales/marketing process.
2. Poor Sales/Marketing Alignment
If stagnant growth is an issue,chances are high that you’ve seen a decline in pipeline performance at critical stages in the sales/marketing journey. A shrinking pipeline calls for front-to-back troubleshooting from a united sales and marketing front. What must come next is a discussion about sales-marketing integration to make sure everyone stays on the same page about both short- and long-term objectives.
3. Not capturing demand
Put simply, capturing demand means bringing leads in the door. Are your marketing efforts robust and/or effective enough to capitalize on prospect interest? If not, your sales team won’t have enough opportunities to close the business necessary to drive growth. This boils down to an issue of prospect communication. If they’re searching for the right solution to a problem their organization is facing, your team has to make it abundantly clear that your product or service is exactly what the prospect needs to succeed.
4. Not creating demand
The other side of the demand equation puts the onus on marketing to generate interest. If your attention is only focused on capturing demand, then your pipeline will run dry — and quickly. Before you can capture demand, you have to create it. How much time is your team allocating to developing white papers, case studies, testimonials, and other demand-building content? These pieces are mission-critical to positioning your sales team for swift conversions. By getting ahead of the game and broadcasting the right content in the early-stage marketing funnel, you can organically grow demand and give your sales reps the tools they need for fruitful conversations.
5. Lack of product-market fit
Sometimes, the problem is as simple as the wrong fit. Have you done enough audience research to confidently say that your target market cares about your product or service? This issue is the hardest to diagnose, as it tends to be the underlying cause of many other factors working to inhibit growth. Certain indicators, like low content engagement and diminishing pipeline activity, point to poor product-market fit. This means your team is either trying to sell to the wrong audience or you haven’t fleshed out your value propositions enough to effectively generate and capture demand.