Wouldn’t it be great if your sales and marketing teams worked together? Imagine how seamless product-customer interactions would become. If it’s not a possibility you’ve considered, hurry up before you start missing out on potential conversions.
Sales and marketing, the two departments deemed the spearheads of any business, more often than not, seem to work against each other. The two are generally separated on the premises of different goals, incompatible strategies, and job functions. However, in the broader picture, both sales and marketing are an integral part of the entire contract management cycle.
What is sales and marketing alignment?
Smarketing or integrated sales and marketing is the alignment of goals and objectives for the two departments. If you think about it, it makes absolute sense to align the two during a single revenue cycle as they essentially have common goals to increase ROI, improve sales productivity, and boost business growth. Moreover, aligned sales and marketing help increase the client base and make it easier to track performance and deliver substantial improvements.
Sales and marketing alignment facilitates follow-ups on marketing leads which in turn results in higher sales conversions.
Here are a few benefits Smarketing can have for your reps:
- Marketing
- Insights into markets and lead procurement
- Understanding which leads to nurture
- Converting leads to opportunities
- Increased emphasis on identifying relevant sources and content
- Sales
- Conducting follow-ups on opportunities and customers
- Gathering detailed information on every lead
- Focussed nurturing of cold leads through sales activities
What are the components to keep in mind when aligning sales and marketing?
Sales and marketing alignment works best when there is:
- Goal and role alignment: Marketing has more long-term goals and seeks to improve brand image, brand awareness, and generating qualified leads (MQLs). On the other hand, sales reps are concerned with short-term initiatives like meeting targets, problem-solving, and customer communications. As ludicrous as it sounds, sales and marketing goals can most certainly be aligned as marketers can help sales reps make sales using their consumer information. This not only helps achieve sales quotas but also enhances brand recognition through consistent service delivery.
- Content alignment: A strong content marketing strategy can help improve sales and marketing leadership by enabling the team with relevant materials. It is very common for sales reps to have product-centric content while marketing reps have more brand-centric content. However, the alignment works only when sales enablement processes are in sync with the content put out in marketing campaigns. Both sides must come to an agreement on the kind of information to be used for increasing the customer base.
- Communication channel alignment: Smarketing ensures that sales and marketing are part of the same dedicated communication loop be it via Slack channels, email templates, or regular huddles. As a result, updates are sent to team members across the departments to keep them on top of each other’s work. This saves a lot of precious time in the long run and helps create relevant content regularly.
- Process and systems alignment: Unified sales and marketing automation tools can facilitate cross functional collaboration between the two while improving customer experience through increased efficiency. This also implies that marketing campaigns and sales drives are automated across multiple channels to generate useful data reports and new customers.
5 ways to align sales and marketing processes
Aligning your sales and marketing departments can prove to be a tough task in the beginning. You might be confused and not know where to start and which path to take.
Here are 5 ways you can achieve a smooth transition for better-integrated results:
1. Focus on the customer
All sales and marketing efforts center around the customer and the purchasing roadmap. The first step is to get sales and marketing to agree on the target buyer. Often, the misalignment begins when disagreeing on the buyer persona. Sales and marketing must work together to create customer profiles that clearly define the objectives, interests, etc. of the customer. This is extremely important as the messaging formats, content materials, as well as campaigns depend on the target buyer.
Additionally, the entire customer journey must be rethought to achieve a single brand view. This will also enable higher connectivity to the prospects across the funnel to track customer progress.
2. Outline a revenue process
According to Hubspot, sales and marketing misalignment costs businesses $1 trillion each year in decreased sales productivity and wasted marketing efforts. That is a massive loss of revenue.
Since sales and marketing have a common goal of adding to the revenue cycle, the process must be structured in such a way that there are clear conversion points. Both sales and marketing must take up ownership of different stages of the process and strive to evaluate current revenue and projected revenue for the business cycles.
3. Maintain consistent communication
Communication is key to maintaining customer relationships. Messages put out by the company can either make or break its reputation. On most occasions, sales and marketing differ on the kind of correspondence being carried out. While marketers feel that their ‘marketing speak’ adds the most value, the same messaging format cannot be used by sales representatives in their daily sales pitches. In organizations where sales and marketing are aligned, managers have a special department that looks into rolling out brand messages.
These communication departments constitute both sales and marketing executives. It’s quite simple; sales reps understand the product thoroughly while marketers know what works for the customer strategically.
4. Record and share data reports
Listing down the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you want your sales and marketing teams to track is an important part of bringing the two departments together. These KPIs could either be lead types, number of prospects in the pipeline, or conversion rates. Once you have decided on these indicators, the data must be recorded regularly. Ensure that sales and marketing reps have access to the same information at all times.
Shared data reports can help build trust between the teams and can help accelerate the customer’s journey through the buying process.
5. Create feedback loops
What use is an aligned sales and marketing team if it does not go through regular intervals of review and feedback loops?
A good way of guaranteeing that the alignment processes are hitting the right goals is by holding meetings between the two departments that are focused on understanding what worked and what didn’t. The objective of these meetings must be to explore which strategies are getting relevant prospects and leading to increased conversions.
Another method of optimizing feedback is simply by listening intently to what the target customer wants. Both sales and marketing reps receive very different forms of customer feedback. This feedback can be aligned to evaluate the voice of customer data to gain deeper insights into further process improvements. For sales, this feedback is mostly obtained through sales calls which are a great way to understand the customer’s pain points. In the same way, marketing messages on social media also receive tons of customer feedback which can be filtered out to understand where the two departments can join forces together.
How to evaluate sales and marketing outcomes?
Once you’ve figured out the strategies to align your sales and marketing efforts, it’s time to dive headfirst into the resulting data and outcome analysis.
To get a deeper understanding of what each team has achieved during the revenue cycle, it is important to formulate certain key metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the rate of success or failure.
The metrics that you would want to usually measure should be related to the business activities of sales as well as marketing. This ensures that there is equal accountability on both sides which will further the success of the teams working together.
- Marketing qualified leads (MQL): In layman’s terms, an MQL is simply any lead (contact) whose interest has been piqued by your product or service. MQLs can be generated either through personal interactions or the marketing channels that are in place.
However, the leads acquired through marketing endeavors are often not passed on to the sales team. This results in misalignment and the division of teams based on the type of leads which can become disruptive for the business pretty quickly. For maximum operational efficiency, make sure that the marketing team passes on their leads to the sales reps so the balance between quality and quantity of leads is maintained.
- Sales qualified leads (SQL): A contact who has been determined as a good fit for your product but not converted yet is termed as an SQL. SQLs are most often researched by the marketing department following which it is vetted by the sales team. The sales team then indicates the actions to be taken on the customer journey. It is important for sales and marketing to collaborate on these leads to work out which prospect must be pushed to the later stages of the process.
- Lead scoring: Once the lead generation process is underway, obtained leads are scored based on sales preparedness. Sales frameworks such as BANT (budget, authority, need, timing) can help identify how qualified a lead is to work with your business and decide which leads should be prioritized. Furthermore, lead scoring strengthens the buying and revenue cycles.
- Service level agreements (SLA): These are a form of commitment made between customers and service providers. An SLA outlines the negotiable aspects of the service such as efficiency, availability, and responsibilities. Automated SLAs can also have a significant impact on lead tracking and record-keeping by finding, describing, and documenting any ambiguity on both sides of the agreement.
Sales and marketing alignment will save your business
When sales and marketing teams are aligned, your business has the potential to expand and scale beyond quarterly or even annual goals. Sales and marketing alignment allows you to discover valuable insights into the sales and marketing funnels while helping to create strategies that save time and create novel business opportunities.
Two is better than one when it comes to marketing as it is the perfect way to move forward collectively with what each department can achieve on its own.
Guest Post
Author: Aayushi Sanghavi
Bio: Aayushi Sanghavi is a Content Community Writer at G2, India. She has written on topics such as HR, Tech, and SaaS. A networker by nature, Aayushi has freelanced her way into the world of content writing and editing. In her free time, she’s either reading, dancing, or most definitely staring at her cat.
