New Year, New Strategy: Sales and Marketing Alignment
Sales and marketing are two vital teams that contribute to the success of your business. Getting these teams on the same page is important to achieving your revenue goals and improving morale.
However, for most companies, this is easier said than done. Both groups have different goals and priorities, but they rely on each other to achieve them, making alignment necessary. How can we get sales and marketing aligned to reach business goals? You’ll know by the end of this article.
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Why Should You Focus on Sales and Marketing Alignment?
Sales and marketing are working within their teams to develop plans and strategies to meet their respective goals and objectives. Gaining consensus to share goals, priorities, and key performance indicators (KPIs) is the key to successfully aligning your sales and marketing.
The ROI of spending time aligning sales and marketing is huge. According to Marketo, sales and marketing alignment can lead to a 32% increase in year-over-year revenue. Both sales and marketing revenue will also increase. It’s worth spending time on and continuing to work toward better alignment.
By sharing goals and priorities, you will deliver a seamless experience for the prospect and customer, increase conversion rates, and ultimately grow your revenue while boosting employee satisfaction.
A Common Scenario Within Organizations
Can you relate to this scenario? Marketing is doing several activities and creating content to drive quality leads. This could include:
- Hosting webinars
- Creating social media content
- Writing blogs
- Creating lead magnets like Ebooks, guides, and other gated content downloads
- Managing ad campaigns on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and other channels
- Working on partnership opportunities
Marketing is focused on driving leads, while sales are graded on reaching a set number of opportunities and revenue targets. Both are extremely important to business success, but both need to work together to reach these objectives.
Sales are so focused on achieving revenue targets and going after the “big fish” clients that the “small fish” leads marketing produces can be ignored. As you can see, this can cause frustration on both sides: Marketing is producing quality leads that aren’t being followed up on, and sales wants marketing to give them better (bigger) leads ready to buy now. Small fish clients add up, but it’s more work on the sales side, so they’d rather focus their time and energy on finding larger clients that will help them reach their revenue goals faster.
The miscommunication and misunderstanding of each other’s job roles cause rifts between the two teams. While alignment doesn’t happen overnight, it is something that needs to be worked on every day to improve the relationship between both parties.
How to Align Sales and Marketing Teams
Now that you know why sales and marketing alignment is important, we’re going to share actionable ways to align the two teams.
1. Schedule regular weekly meetings to keep track of shared goals.
To sync up, schedule regular weekly meetings with sales and marketing teams to agree on shared goals and priorities and report on progress. Each team should communicate about:
- Big wins and accomplishments from the week before
- Sales activities and feedback from call outreach
- The quality of the leads from various marketing activities (e.g., webinars, lists created, LinkedIn Sales Navigator targets, etc.)
- Any roadblocks, obstacles, or things they need better support with
Both teams should have a voice when deciding on the right mix of strategies and solutions to capitalize on opportunities and overcome any challenges along the way.
If you have large sales and marketing teams, this meeting might be best with just the leaders of each team. When the leaders are on board with the plan, they can communicate and take the initiative to ensure each of their team members is too.
Asking sales for customer and prospect feedback is another key opportunity in refining your marketing messaging, and content offers to make sure they are on point and that you are answering the questions buyers have along their purchasing journey.
Often, we see teams working in silos, missing out on this very important feedback from customers and prospects. The sales leader and marketing leader should own the collaboration between the two teams, ensuring they are sharing information and collecting feedback along the way so they can improve on their key initiatives.
2. Look at the big and small picture.
Marketing often focuses on the small picture: “How many leads can I produce with this webinar? Sales’ focus is on the big picture: “Will this person bring me more opportunities in the future and be a loyal customer?” Meeting somewhere in the middle is a healthy compromise, as both short- and long-term goals and activities are important to success.
3. Identify the target markets.
When both teams identify key target audiences, they can make the most of collaborative efforts. Having a target market in mind allows sales and marketing to work together to create the perfect approach.
They will also need to understand this target market and key buyer personas. Both teams will have unique insights, as marketing understands how to draw customers in, and sales knows how to engage the prospect with the right qualifying questions to turn that interest into a sale. By working together, they can create a seamless customer and prospect experience.
4. Define metrics for both teams.
Conversions are the main goal, but other milestone metrics are just as important to meet the main goal. Here are some of the key metrics to measure:
- Driving traffic to the website.
- Post shares on social media.
- Email click rate.
- Top channel referral sources.
- The number of calls attempted.
- The number of opportunities created.
For marketing, it could be focused on email click rates, form completions, or website visits. For sales, it could be the number of calls made, the number of client connections, voicemail messages, bad numbers, opportunities created, or quotes sent out.
By having clear goals and metrics, the team can work together to improve the numbers. It also keeps everyone on the same page and accountable for achieving their goals to reach the organization’s business objectives.
5. Create a content plan together.
Marketing teams are constantly creating new promotions and content offers. Sales need to be aware of what their prospects are receiving so they aren’t caught off guard on a call. Creating a content plan together will ensure everyone is in alignment with the activities for the upcoming week or month.
Marketing needs to communicate every Monday what they completed the week before and share links to key materials released. It’s easy to think that salespeople can just go online to find it, but that’s short-sighted. Marketing needs to make it easy for salespeople to review and digest the information. It’s best to organize your materials by the audience and by product so they can quickly find what they need before contacting their prospects.
A shared content calendar is a great way to keep everyone on the same page. When sales are aware of marketing activities, they can align with their weekly and monthly activities. For example, if marketing is sending an email promoting a webinar, the sales activity could be following up with those who clicked the email but didn’t register. Another good example is sharing links to new content guides and sales materials for easy reference for sales.
6. Share reports and analytics.
Now that your sales and marketing teams are in alignment on metrics, it’s important to set up weekly reports and monthly analytics reviews to share what’s working and what is not working. Include what you learned from each campaign, which campaigns are performing the best, and how to improve in the future. Don’t let this be an accusatory session, though; everyone on the team plays a critical role in the success or failure of a campaign. There are always things to be improved.
The most important thing to remember here is to also celebrate each other’s wins each week! You can do this internally by hosting a meeting and sending out a weekly Monday meeting update recapping the big wins and accomplishments from the previous week. Giving shoutouts to your team members and/or offering bonuses is also a good thing to focus on recognition. Lastly, you can consider recognizing your team members externally by featuring them in a kudos post on your social media channels (e.g., LinkedIn offers a Kudos post feature) or writing a case study following a successful sales or marketing win. Celebrating these big wins and accomplishments boosts team morale and improves the relationships between your team members.
Aligning sales and marketing teams is a challenge in nearly every organization. It doesn’t have to be, though! Once you create a strategy to align your sales and marketing teams and create the internal processes to keep everyone on target, you’ll see higher revenue numbers from both parties, plus happier employees. Investing in sales and marketing alignment is a worthwhile investment.
Ready to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams?
Does your organization need assistance aligning sales and marketing teams? Schedule a free 30-minute assessment with our team to learn how we can help.
