10 Tips for Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Team

No matter what industry you are in, sales and marketing alignment are key to achieving success. You will be amazed at how teamwork can make your marketing campaigns a success.

Source: Teamgate

This disconnect is due to the seemingly different goals of both teams. While the marketing team is expected generate as many leads possible, the sales team is expected and under pressure to convert those leads into paying customers.

The former tends to place too much emphasis on quantity at the expense quality. The latter blames the marketing team for failing to qualify leads properly.

Focusing on results is one way to unite these two teams. This means that ROI should be the responsibility of all employees and not just the individual teams. The whole company benefits from a shorter sales cycle, better targeting of the target market and better communication between the teams.

This allows you to close the gap between quality and quantity of leads.

To get you started, here's a short intro video by Neighbourhood:

Quick Takeaways

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  Content curation will reduce your time spent on overall content marketing
  
  

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  By creating systems that allow you to focus your resources and time on accounts most likely to be closed, you can save time
  
  

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  Creating a common goal and time frame for your team to be on the same page builds trust
  
  

These are some best practices that you can use to align your marketing and sales teams.

1. Organise regular meetings

Although it may seem obvious, it can be difficult to make time for regular meetings, especially when there is a deadline to meet or time becomes scarce.

Dreamdata.io Says:

To ensure everyone is swimming in the same direction, benchmarks and goals are essential. Revenue is the top goal.

To share benchmarks and goals, you must be on the same page.

It is important to make time for catch-ups as these sessions are crucial in alignment. You can make the most of these meetings by setting a clear agenda for sharing processes, resources and best practices.

Marketers need to be updated about the progress of their sales teams in meeting their goals and quotas. This allows marketing to provide specific support as needed.

2. Secure Executive Commitment

If you have the support of the top C-suite personnel, your chances of success are higher. This places a lot of emphasis on unity and sends the message that you mean business throughout the company.

This is particularly important for companies with clear rivalry between these functions. The executive level buy-in can help to neutralize tensions, and ensure everyone is on the same page.

3. Do not tie ROI solely to sales

Marketing has always been focused on generating as many leads possible. Marketing has always been more concerned with generating leads than generating revenue.

Marketing must align with both teams in order to create strategies that are focused on revenue generation. To help you tie campaigns to your MROI, KPIs like “deals influenced” and “deals source” can be used.

4. Create a common set of definitions

This helps to ensure that both and literally are on the same page. This promotes clear communication between teams so that confusion and misunderstandings can be minimized.

Both teams can communicate their views on certain aspects of business by creating common definitions.

A “lead” could be used to refer to different things in different departments. What qualifications are required for these leads to be considered leads? For best results, don't be afraid to be as specific as you can.

5. Agree on a Single Customer view

Source: Commbox

Each team must spend the time to identify their target audience. Both teams must have a clear understanding of their ideal customer. This can be done by sharing the knowledge between them.

You should get to know each customer contact until you have a complete picture that is based on mutual understanding and shared goals. You will need to create customer profiles in order to define your KPIs as well as overall business goals.

6. Marketing should keep sales informed about upcoming campaigns

It is important to make sure that all new campaigns and content are shared with your sales team. This creates a seamless front for the sales team to directly engage leads who have ingested these marketing materials.

When you send out an email blast or acquire new leads, make sure marketing coordinates with sales. This will give you insight into the customer's interests and will help sales reps understand what motivates them to take the next steps.

7. Use a closed-loop feedback system

Source: Bain & Company

Sales teams communicate with prospects and leads regularly so that they can best tell you what customers want. They may not always be able to capture these insights and this can cause a disruption in communication.

This issue can be addressed by using shared documents to gather ideas and references. Regular brainstorming sessions are a great way for sales staff to share their knowledge about how to attract leads and what content will resonate with prospects.

Closed-loop feedback will allow for open communication and ensure that customers are able to take advantage of all available opportunities.

8. Create strategic content

Your content team should not be the only ones responsible for creating content. You should take advantage of the knowledge available to your entire company.

Your sales team has a deep understanding of customers' needs. Why not make your content more relevant to them?

Interview them and ghostwrite for them. If they are so inclined, you can have them write the post. This will give you new knowledge and assist with employee activation.

9. Tandem must be a combination of quality and quantity.

Find the perfect balance between lead quality and quantity to optimize your lead generation efforts. The type of company and the industry will determine which combination is best.

You have to test and test again until you find the balance that is right for you. Ask yourself these questions:

• Are sales conversion rates possible if more attention is paid to the qualification process?
• Can we increase lead volume by focusing less on qualification?

Learn how to shift your focus to get the best ROI for your business.

10. Easy Accessibility to Sales-Enablement Resources

Brochures, presentations and overviews should all be stored in a shared area (like Google Drive), so that sales staff can quickly access these resources.

This shared file can contain your marketing strategy, campaign schedule, relevant offers, blog posts and any other content that is tailored to specific customer personas. With more contextually-relevant information, sales teams will be able to tailor their sales pitch more effectively.

Wrap-up

Sales and marketing used to operate independently in most companies. Rarely do you find the two functions working together as a team with common goals.

Sometimes there is even rivalry between them, as both sides fail to see the benefits of the other. Some teams find common ground with no outside interference. However, it is possible to have successful collaborations between different teams. It is best to assign managers or personnel to ensure their alignment.

As they are able to set operational goals, this responsibility falls primarily on the shoulders of key decision-makers. Your sales and marketing teams will likely resist change.

You'll see higher conversion rates, better performance by both the sales and marketing teams, as well as a more functional work environment if you have a clear focus and a plan.

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