Aligning your sales and marketing teams is a crucial propellor for generating high-quality leads. But how do you attain this?
Syncing sales and marketing is an ideal scenario that maintains your growth trajectory. The alignment also delivers a cohesive experience for the target customer base while generating high revenue returns. Although most businesses are aware of this, achieving the unison is easier said than done. Studies indicate that only 8% of brands have successfully aligned their sales and marketing divisions.
Content Marketing Institute found that in cases of misalignment between sales and marketing domains, around 70% of content generated by marketers goes unused because it lacks relevance to the buyer persona. Whereas, HubSpot believes that sales teams struggle to convert around 79% of leads due to a shortcoming to nurture leads. Getting sales and marketing on the same page involves establishing shared goals, strategies, systems, and processes to work unified as a brand. As a result, you can attain better outcomes from marketing activities, such as more closed deals, a higher ROI, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
What happens when Sales & Marketing are misaligned
It is a known fact that sales and marketing diligently work towards the same goal of driving growth and adding to the client network. However, they work in separate silos with different data sets, dealing with metrics, analytics, and so on. When they work as independent streams., it creates a monolithic environment having less capacity to leverage each other’s core competencies. Let’s look at some of the common problems that arise when both sides are working in synergy:
Siloed customer data
The absence of data unification can cause each team to be misinformed about their leads and customers and what they are seeking. For instance, if a sales team is unaware of the marketing strategy being implemented, it may be clueless about client interactions. Alternatively, the marketing team may not receive insights from the sales calls and end up launching campaigns for the wrong audience. This confusion can be avoided by fostering a strong alignment among these two domains.
Under-utilized sales content
Marketing teams strive to create relevant content designed for the target audience, specific to the platforms they frequent. However, if the sales reps do not provide input, all these efforts become futile. When marketers create various forms of content, be it infographics, industry reports, white papers, or some other materials, they need to communicate to the sales team the use of these resources. An alliance among these two sections can help address the sales rep’s needs and deliver result-oriented effective content.
Lead quality
Identifying the target audience is a catalyst to enhance your overall lead quality. Your sales team may focus on adding information-qualified leads, only to be disappointed when the prospects don’t convert into paying accounts. If sales and marketing together identify the lead categories and agree on lead scoring, they can operate more effectively. In this way, the sales team remains updated on the buyer’s journey and the data exchanged during the interactions. It also enables them to prioritize the prospects likely to convert into paying accounts.
The Benefits of Aligning Sales & Marketing
Simply put, misalignment of sales and marketing can hinder customer experience to a large extent. On the contrary, aligning these teams creates a synergistic cross-functional team that can drive your sales pipeline. The partnership between these two teams creates shared objectives and synchronized processes. The marketing branch can help sales generate, qualify, and nurture leads in the sales pipeline. Whereas, sales can promote marketing to bridge any gaps in the funnel. This alignment draws more high-quality leads while shortening the sales cycle. Let’s dive into why it is beneficial to align sales and marketing.
Effective Databank
The current B2B sales and marketing have geared towards a more fragmented solution generating large volumes of data but few insights. Aligning sales and marketing under a common plan results in an integrated tech stack that creates a high-quality data set for both teams.
Highly Motivated Teams
Sales and marketing alignment makes both teams work towards a common goal rather than competing with each other. The outcome is— better performance efficiency and higher revenue growth. Foster better cross-functional collaboration that also contributes to revenue growth. Moreover, aligned teams may be more inclined to stay, contributing to less employee churn.
Improved Resource Utilization
Sales are not involved in content creation. When there is better alignment between these teams, it allows you to deliver more customer-oriented and data-driven messages with input from sales.
Quick and Sustained Growth
Sales and marketing alignment brings them together to collaborate towards a common end goal— higher sales and growth. When everyone heads in the same direction, the friction between the two teams is greatly reduced and the resource utilization goes up. Additionally, the data can become more systematic and lead to streamlined organizational efficiency.
How to establish sales and marketing alignment
These best practices can be your go-to for bringing sales and marketing on the same page.
Set goals
If you may face misalignment, begin by defining objectives and allow both teams to recognize that they are working towards shared goals. This can be anything, from a company’s initiative to a new campaign to adding more clients, both teams must agree on business goals. A stepping stone to uniting sales and marketing is to bring their perspectives on the same page.
Decide a strategy
The next step is for both teams to avoid building independent go-to-market programs. Sales and marketing leaders need to meet regularly to map the buyer’s journey and discuss lead generation, conversion rates, inbound sales tactics, and more. Initiatives such as leadership offsite or regular standing bring clarity and ensure that these divisions work towards the shared goals you discussed previously.
Agree on processes
While executing business objectives, the sales and marketing managers will inevitably interact. If you have a model for promoting cross-functional collaboration, it makes it easy to instill clear communication and eliminate confusion surrounding responsibilities and expectations. Establish the sales and marketing elements upfront to streamline collaborative engagements and amp up the sales funnel.
Create better communications
Poor communication can trigger misalignment of sales and marketing. The best thing to do in such cases is to encourage centralized communication, which ensures that important conversations never go amiss. And transparency in the chain of communication is maintained. You can achieve centralized communication through tools or email campaigns.
Focus on sales enablement
A robust sales enablement framework improves the alignment between these teams. This forms a natural conduit between marketing and sales. For example, there is a sales enablement team to ensure that assets are not presented to sellers without training and guidance on effective application. Investing in a sales enablement team allows you to create reliable information between organizations.
Lead by example
When top leaders in your brand work hard to create the alignments, it works like a ripple effect across the team. Scheduling meetings between the leads of both teams to communicate the explore growth opportunities, offer feedback, and celebrate cross-functional wins can go a long way.
Streamline internal processes
You may be surprised to determine the influence of implementing organizational changes when aligning sales and marketing domains. In this step, introduce niche roles focusing on a specific aspect of the business, like strategy and development, demand generation, and nurturing prospects, for instance. You can also get content marketers on board to develop compelling messages aligned with each stage of the buyer’s journey. This stage is about building a solid framework for each phase of the customer journey, leading to a stronger collaboration between sales and marketing and driving business growth.
For every business that wants to survive the competition and thrive, aligning sales and marketing is no longer a choice. It is necessary to generate B2B leads and grow your brand. Evaluate the current state of these two teams in terms of alignment. The best practices listed here will guide you to build a cohesive relationship between these domains, enabling your teams to achieve the targets and create your mark in the industry.