Alignment is the holy grail of marketing and sales teams everywhere. It is often sought but seldom attained. It’s easy to see why: aligned teams are more productive and efficient. It’s not rare to encounter a firm, no matter how big or small, where the sales or marketing teams are in charge. However, finding a top digital marketing company dedicated to both and views the two functions as an equal and integrated team is difficult.
The divide derives from the seemingly divergent agendas of these two teams. The marketing team is responsible for generating as many leads as possible, while the sales team is responsible for transforming those leads into new clients. This often leads to the former focusing on a number over quality, while the latter blaming the failure to close on the marketing team’s ineffective lead qualification.
One strategy to bring these two groups together is to focus your efforts on results by making ROI a company-wide responsibility rather than the duty of individual teams. The entire organization benefits from a faster sales cycle and improved target market profiling when both teams see the big picture. This assists in removing the gap between the quantity and quality of leads.
What Is Sales And Marketing Alignment?
Marketing and sales alignment is a standard communication, strategy, and goals system that allows marketing and sales to work together. When linked teams work together, they can offer high-impact marketing initiatives, improve sales performance, and grow revenue.
In today’s world, the combination of sales and marketing is referred to as smarketing. It means that the sales and marketing teams are so tightly integrated that they operate as a single entity. Simply said, it’s a technique of thinking about how to integrate sales and marketing, such as which goals, procedures, and communications overlap and how to optimize them together.
To begin with, have a look at the video that will help you explore the essential tips to align the sales and marketing funnel.
For an in-depth strategy, we have also gathered a few tips to ace your sales and marketing alignment to grow your business as one unit. Let’s dive in!
1. Practice Easy Collaboration
Making it simple to align your sales and marketing teams is the first step. The marketing department leverages feedback from sales teams to create high-quality material tailored to pique the attention of prospects. In contrast, sales rely on the information shared with customers by the marketing department.
To ensure that communication between these two departments is streamlined, all resources and materials should be kept in a central location accessible to everybody. Cloud-based storage systems such as Google Drive and Dropbox are highly beneficial and simple for storing any business-related data. Moreover, shared filing systems also make it easier for team leaders to deliver relevant and timely documents, streamlining processes and resulting in more productive teams.
2. Conduct Regular Meetings
It may seem self-evident, but scheduling frequent meetings may be difficult, especially when deadlines meet and time is premium. In any case, you should always schedule a time to catch up because these knowledge-sharing sessions are crucial to the alignment process.
Make the most of these meetings by creating a clear plan that allows both parties to discuss procedures, resources, and best practices. In addition, marketers must be constantly informed about the sales team’s progress in fulfilling quotas and targets so that marketing can provide exceptional support when needed.
3. Embrace Technology
A well-aligned marketing and sales team shares the same objectives and metrics, which necessitates tracking their progress together. This will be handled by a good marketing automation program or customer relationship management system.
Both teams can comprehend pipelines and real-time metrics using a shared dashboard, allowing them to shape their plans together. They may share information, send notes, and pull reports from the same database in real-time. According to research, most top-performing organizations give marketers access to the sales team’s CRM system.
4. Make Common Smarketing Goals
The two departments must align their end goals before they can start setting joint smarketing targets. Setting out monthly time for sales and marketing teams to meet and cooperate on lead generation goals will help both departments become more productive and efficient.
Suppose the sales team is having trouble selling a particular service or product. In that case, marketing teams might devise a strategy to raise awareness and market the product or service to high-potential prospects. The sales staff can then take over and move these leads through the online sales funnel, perhaps closing some agreements.
5. Create Content Together
Creating branded content and sales material is one of the most critical things that sales and marketing can collaborate on. Sales require great content to create organic leads and move current leads farther down the funnel. For example, whitepapers and case studies might provide the final piece of information that a potential consumer requires to make a decision. On the other hand, marketing typically develops content to increase search engine ranks, website engagement, and traffic.
Marketing and sales teams must collaborate rather than create this material alone. The key to keeping leads interested throughout the process is to keep the message and tone consistent across all content.
Summary
As we move ahead of traditional marketing and sales approaches, forward-thinking companies will focus on developing an atmosphere that encourages smarketing alignment to boost revenue, create a cohesive employee team, and effectively expand the firm over time. However, aligning sales and marketing necessitates time and resource investment from all parties involved.
Even if you are a startup company or a well-known corporation, sales and marketing alignment is crucial to your success. With this, you will be on your way to winning together once you’ve implemented these best practices.
Want to build a powerful lead generation marketing strategy that utilizes the skill of both your sales and marketing teams? Contact Propel Guru’s team of experts who will provide you with up-to-date methods for driving more leads and revenue.
Ausaf Ahmed
Senior Project Delivery Manager
A passionate and enthusiastic senior digital marketing and sales specialist who is highly proficient in planning, implementing, managing the entire business-to-business sales and marketing process for selling the company’s advertising products and services. Having rich expertise and in-depth domain knowledge in the field of both sales and digital marketing, he ensures that he has a confident and winning attitude even during challenging business interactions.
