Looking to align your sales and marketing teams better? Check out these 5 tips.
Sales and marketing teams both play critical roles in the success of any business. And when these two teams work well together, “magic” happens. The customer journey is seamless, conversion rates increase, and revenue goals are achieved.
That said, this is often not the case. In fact, the lack of alignment between sales and marketing is one of the most common issues companies face—especially as they grow.
The good news is there are several things you can do today to align your sales and marketing teams and keep them aligned as you grow.
Defining and documenting your ICP is a crucial step for sales and marketing alignment because it creates a shared understanding of who your target audience is, their pain points, and their needs.
With a clearly defined ICP, marketing teams can create targeted campaigns and compelling content that speak directly to your target buyers. Sales can use the same information to qualify leads and leverage marketing’s content to accelerate deals through the pipeline.
Both teams are focused on the same buyers, speaking the same language, and working together to drive revenue for the business.
Shared goals help align sales and marketing by providing a common objective that both teams can work towards, creating a sense of unity and collaboration. The best shared goals are those that align with an overarching company objective, such as a revenue goal.
Once a shared goal is established, each team can determine how best to contribute. For example, to achieve a specific revenue goal, sales can determine that they’ll need to sign on a certain number of customers and marketing can determine that they’ll need to deliver a certain number of qualified leads.
While each team has their own contributing objectives, success is defined by achieving the overarching shared goal. This gets both teams thinking about the bigger picture and working together to improve processes that optimize the entire system rather than just their individual departments.
SLAs are powerful tools for ensuring sales and marketing alignment as they clearly define the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of each team.
Take lead qualification and follow-up, for example. This is a common area of misalignment between sales and marketing. Sales often complains that marketing generated leads are unqualified and marketing often complains that sales doesn’t follow-up with leads in a timely manner.
By clearly defining what makes a lead qualified and the required follow-up time from sales, SLAs create a common understanding between sales and marketing on what is expected of each team to drive the business forward.
Recurring meetings between sales and marketing serve as an important venue for ensuring ongoing communication and collaboration between the two teams.
During these meetings, sales can share insights from the field that influence future marketing campaigns, marketing can brief sales on upcoming initiatives so they’re prepared to reap the benefits, and both teams can review their progress towards shared goals.
Beyond alignment, these regular meetings foster a culture of transparency and candor whereby team members are encouraged to share feedback and ideas that can drive better results for the business.
True sales and marketing alignment can only be achieved if both teams develop an understanding and respect for each other’s practice.
Beyond recurring meetings, marketing should invest time in joining pitches, listening to recordings of sales calls, and learning the nuances of the sales process. Likewise, sales should take time to understand the various marketing practices—from product marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, event marketing, communications/PR, through to demand generation—and the role that each plays in supporting the revenue engine.
Without an understanding and respect for each other’s practice, sales and marketing alignment will always be a pipe dream.
