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Did you know that businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals?
They're also 58% better at retaining customers, so it’s easy to see why 87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between these two departments enables critical business growth.
Yet in too many cases, sales and marketing departments operate in silos, as leaders fear that effective alignment is too big of a hill to climb.
But would you believe us if we said it’s actually pretty easy to achieve, and simply comes down to effective communication?
In this article, we'll dive into some of the easiest ways you can align sales and marketing in your business.
Establish clear communication channels across departments
Communication is critical for any department to work with another.
So, if you want to achieve true alignment between marketing and sales, you need to establish clear communication channels.
These may differ depending on your budget and the preferences of your teams. However, company intranets, live chats and shared task managers are all great ways for teams to form working partnerships and collaborate seamlessly alongside one another.
Regular meetings and joint strategy sessions can also foster a sense of unity and shared purpose by allowing both teams to discuss their objectives, share insights and address any challenges they may be facing.
Face-to-face meetings (where possible) will also play a pivotal role in achieving sales and marketing alignment. These interactions provide an opportunity to build partnerships and rapport. Although these can become more difficult as teams get bigger, the benefits are well worth the effort.
Use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
Adopting a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can make it much easier to manage interactions with prospects and customers by centralising all data, providing both sales and marketing teams with a comprehensive view of customer interactions and history.
Many CRM solutions also allow for seamless integration with other systems, such as email marketing platforms, social media management software and analytics tools.
All of this makes it easier for marketing and sales teams to work together and prevents misalignment. In fact, a staggering 79% of sales professionals said their CRM moderately or extremely improves their sales and marketing alignment.
So if you don’t already have a CRM in place or your existing platform is no longer fit for purpose, now is the time to invest in one.
Agree on a buyer persona
With clear channels of communication now in place, your teams must create and agree on buyer personas.
By defining their audience and identifying what makes them unique, both sales and marketing can better target customers and increase the chance of making a sale.
A great example of how effective this can be comes from Thomson Reuters. Using buyer personas, they saw a 175% surge in marketing revenue, along with a 10% uptake in leads sent to sales and a 72% reduction in lead conversion time.
Clearly, buying personas can have a huge impact on the success of both teams.
But creating buyer personas isn't as simple as defining a wider audience and understanding who might buy your goods or services.
It’s about digging deeper into the customer journey, how buyers research products and why they might need your product or service in the first place.
That's why sales and marketing teams must work closely together to agree on their buyer personas. This alignment will ensure cohesion across future strategies, enabling the creation of targeted and effective campaigns.
Recommended reading: How to build an ideal customer profile for better lead generation results [+ free template]
Set shared goals
Your marketing team may well have its own objectives, like building brand awareness, but in order to achieve alignment, both sales and marketing need to agree on shared goals.
This way, they can identify areas of crossover and how the teams can support one another to reach said goals. This collaborative approach also allows for better allocation of resources and efforts, ensuring that every action taken by either team contributes to the overall success of the business.
For example, if the objective is to generate more top-quality leads, the marketing team can use intent data and produce relevant content to bring in these leads. This might involve creating targeted blog posts, whitepapers and social media campaigns that resonate with potential customers. Once these leads are captured (and nurtured), they can be handed over to the sales team to convert, and deliver revenue.
Shared goals can really help sales and marketing agree on messaging, sales techniques and protocols, contributing to both the consistency and personalisation of lead generation strategies.
It can even support campaign optimisation by helping both teams decide how (and when) to update one another on their progress and allowing for real-time adjustments.
Identify the right KPIs
In order to set shared goals, it’s important to identify and track the right metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). This way, both teams can measure performance and analyse data to determine if they're achieving their shared goals.
Some important metrics you can use to measure performance include:
- Email marketing open rates
- Lead scoring
- Average deal size
- Lead conversion rates
- Customer acquisition costs
- Customer lifetime value
Understanding how to measure success helps to keep both teams on track and means they can improve and optimise strategies as they go along. It'll also reveal if you're allocating budget and resources in the right areas.
This keeps everyone talking and working together, ensuring better sales and marketing alignment.
Have regular check-ins and idea sessions
Holding regular check-ins is another great way to encourage alignment across your sales and marketing teams. Depending on how big the organisation is, this doesn't have to include every member of the team, but it is important to get feedback from those on the front lines.
There are several key benefits to meeting regularly. Firstly, idea sessions can help the marketing team coordinate its content strategy with the sales team.
For example, if the sales team wants to start pushing a particular product, they can work closely with marketing to ensure they focus their content and advertising efforts in those areas.
Regular idea sessions also give both teams the chance to share their ideas for marketing emails, brochures, pamphlets, web content, social media and more. This fosters creativity and innovation, while simultaneously allowing for consistent messaging that engages and educates potential buyers.
It also provides the opportunity to share reporting and analysis, facts and figures and to address their KPIs and goals, ensuring each team's strategy is driven by data and performance.
Is it time to align your teams?
Communication is the key to true sales and marketing alignment.
These skills may be used in different ways; sometimes it’s sharing ideas, agreeing on marketing content and discussing past campaigns. Other times, it’s nurturing leads, setting goals and analysing results against KPIs.
Whatever stage you’re at in the process, implement these simple communication tips to align your sales and marketing teams and transform your lead generation strategy.
