If your company’s sales and marketing teams aren’t aligning their efforts and key strategies, you could actually be creating several disadvantages for your business compared to your competitors. That’s why it’s so helpful to be aware of the signs that your teams might be out of alignment and the best way to set them up for success and future collaboration.
Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment
There are several key benefits that make aligning your sales and marketing departments a strategic imperative, including:
- Improving Core Business Metrics: According to recent surveys and studies, companies that align their sales and marketing teams tend to generate more annual revenue, brand awareness, and average deal sizes compared to other businesses.
- Developing More Accurate Buyer Personas: Having more accurate buyer personas can help you create more effective sales and marketing strategies to drive up leads and revenue. When companies don’t have aligned sales and marketing teams, they very rarely discuss and develop buyer personas together. That means those companies are missing out on crucial talks and collaborations to improve their marketing and selling efforts.
- Increasing Customer Retention and Growth: Next to improving core business statistics, sales and marketing collaboration also contributes to 36% higher retention rates. That allows businesses to conduct repeat sales of their products and services. It’s also part of the reason why 27% of aligned businesses report faster growth.
How To Determine if Your Sales and Marketing Teams Are Out of Alignment
Here are some ways to tell if your sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned:
Lack of Communication
Lack of communication is often what causes a lot of the other challenges and side-effects of your teams being out of alignment. When your sales and marketing team lack communication, they often have no idea what the other department is focusing on or accomplishing. That includes what goals the other team has and what strategies the team is using to achieve them. Though communication isn’t the only thing your teams need to do to work better together, it is often the first step to a more aligned business strategy.
Reduced Lead Quality
Reduced lead quality is when the leads your marketing team collects aren’t the best match for your sales team’s selling efforts. This can often occur for two reasons:
- Your marketing team isn’t fully aware of what the sales team looks for in a prospective buyer.
- Your sales team isn’t aware of how the marketing team is targeting their leads and what pain points or solutions they’re prioritizing.
Basically, it once again comes down to a breakdown in communication. Because your teams aren’t aligned with one another, the leads your marketing team develops aren’t the best fit for your business’s joint efforts. This can diminish sales and revenue and create a crisis of confidence between sales and marketing for your business.
Missed Opportunities
If your sales and marketing teams aren’t working together, it can create missed opportunities for your business. For example, let’s say your sales team attends an industry event or show where they run a booth. If they don’t talk with your marketing team, they might miss out on an opportunity to do pre-show marketing or a specific promotional offer that the marketing team could create for the event. These missed opportunities are a sure sign that your marketing and sales teams should become more aligned to improve your overall sales and revenue performance.
5 Strategies To Better Align Your Sales and Marketing Team
Here are some winning strategies to help you align your marketing and selling efforts:
1. Set Recurring Meetings
This is one of the first and most important ways to start your alignment journey. That’s because having your sales and marketing teams meet consistently can help them discuss key elements of their alignment strategy, communicate more regularly, and collaborate on different business projects or goals. When you set up your recurring meetings, aim for meeting once a week or twice a month. That way, your teams have some time in between meetings to work towards their goals and implement things they discuss.
2. Leverage The Buyer’s Journey
As your sales and marketing teams start to work together, you want to make sure that each of their actions work in tandem to create a better buying experience for your customers. That often starts with collaborating on a buyer persona. When both teams have a clear understanding of who they’re selling to, then they can focus on how to best attract and engage with leads. That includes what content might work best to attract the leads and what information has been shared with them so sales people know how to best approach the sales conversation.
3. Create Joint Goals
Though it’s okay for your sales and marketing teams to have separate goals, they should also develop joint goals that they can collaborate on and track together. This will help each team communicate more consistently to ensure that they’re on track to achieve their objectives.
For example, a common joint goal that marketing and sales teams work toward is revenue growth. By tracking this key-performance indicator (KPI) your teams can collaborate and figure out the best way each of their strategies and actions can contribute to improving it. Then, during their recurring meetings, they can evaluate their performance, see if their strategies are working, and make needed adjustments.
4. Share Marketing Materials
Marketing materials, such as content, aren’t just useful for your marketing team. Sharing all of the marketing materials and content with the sales team can help them understand the pain points and solutions the marketing team covers and communicate them with prospective customers during sales conversations. The sales team can also share that content with prospects to nurture their leads, increase engagement, further their decision making and help them determine how your company’s products and services can benefit them.
5. Use The Same Tools
Using the same tools can help teams collaborate and communicate more effectively, sharing data and information with one another more efficiently. That includes helpful tools, like CRMs, as well as other tools, like EDA and RigDig BI.
EDA and RigDig BI allow businesses to search for new prospects in their area and uncover insightful information, including what products the prospects already own and what brands they prefer. When the marketing and sales teams use these tools together, they can figure out who their best options are for leads and prospects, develop more targeted buyer personas, and create more effective strategies for their joint goals.