4 Proven Tactics For Sales And Marketing Alignment

Published by Paul Jenkins on May 27, 2022

Sales and marketing are the two key departments that drive companies to achieve objectives. When they work together, a company can easily keep its growth trajectory and reach revenue targets. While many companies are aware of this, such a state of complete alignment is limited.

Research shows that 90% of sales and marketing professionals think their content, strategy, culture, and process are misaligned. This scenario has a severe impact on both the sales and marketing teams.

As such, proper sales and marketing alignment should become part of a company’s internal structure. A company with a team of sales and marketing professionals working together allows the chance of attaining more revenue, better team productivity, a chance to outperform the competition, and an increased return on investment (ROI).

Because of the benefits of having proper sales and marketing alignment, it’s crucial to know some barriers to achieving it and the proven tactics to attain it. It can help you clarify some weaknesses in your company and the steps that may help your company or business in the long run.

Image Source: SuperOffice CRM

Barriers To Proper Sales And Marketing Alignment

If sales and marketing alignment is crucial to business goals accomplishment, why are there few companies that adopt it? The reason is the status quo. Many companies think that sales and marketing teams are two distinct groups. However, when this state of affairs continues in an organization, barriers tend to occur, such as:

• Unclear Communication
• Varying Expectations
• Conflicting Priorities
• Competing Goals
• Misrepresentation Of Objectives
• Lack Of Emotional Buy-In

Overall, if your marketing team needs help meeting KPIs, you can use Salespanel’s customer journey tracking or go to this site and learn about filters.

Proven Tactics For Sales And Marketing Alignment

1. Align Sales And Marketing Strategies

Your sales and marketing teams know that getting new clients is vital to your business. But are they using the same aligned strategies to achieve the common result? Or are they doing their jobs differently from each other without even knowing?

Many companies don’t know the range of sales and marketing strategies that exist today. They may not even be adequately knowledgeable about the unique schemes their sales and marketing teams are currently using for maximum advantage. Because of such, there can be dissimilarities in the approach that both sales and marketing teams are doing.

There are factors you should note to align sales and marketing strategies. Some of them are:

• Both teams must cooperate to determine an ideal buyer.
• Integrate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for better productivity.
• Be clear about what leads are in your company.
• Develop service level agreements (a cross-team commitment that sets out a shared set of expectations on each team’s responsibilities).

2. Have Technology Meant For Sales And Marketing Alignment

Narrow the gap between sales and marketing by leveraging technologies. These technologies can help provide better communication, prevent reluctance in sharing information with the other team, and allow both teams to have insights from regular tasks.

Examples of tools that can help collaborate these two teams are marketing automation tools and CRM systems. By integrating marketing automation tools and CRM systems, your teams can:

• See the whole buyer’s journey.
• Assign follow-up actions easily.
• Sync leads with less difficulty from your marketing automation tool to your CRM database.
• Assess responses from customers to revise content and campaigns (this assists marketers in increasing acquisition and retention).

Specific examples of marketing automation tools and CRM systems are:

• Enriched Data: A tool that can help update datasets with the latest information automatically. This tool can benefit both teams to reach potential customers fast.
• Conversation Intelligence: Helps to target prospects with greater accuracy by gathering insights from emails, video meetings, and phone calls documented.
• Intent Data: Helps both teams to know who they should prioritize in their outreach.
  Overall, technologies are tools that only assist in alignment. Your company still needs a strategy that can work out for both teams.

3. Coordinate The Sales Funnel

Both teams in your company must coordinate regarding the sales funnel. When sales and marketing teams systemize the sales funnel together, they can have a straightforward course of action of pushing the leads down that sales or revenue funnel. This action can entail determining how the new employees who became part of the teams are trained and how both groups can maximize on technology.

Likewise, for the marketing team to foster a lot of leads throughout the sales funnel, creating great content can be ideal. They can also make content that provides social proof of the company’s product or service—such as case studies, tutorials, and video testimonials to push leads that remained for too long in the middle of the funnel down nearer to the purchase level of the sales funnel.

For the leads caught at the bottom of the sales funnel, your team can collaborate to make a special offer acting as a final motivation for them to buy your service or product. Perhaps you can offer a free trial or coupon code for them.

4. Align Key Performance Indicator Metrics

One reason why misalignment occurs is when different success metrics are being kept an eye on by two teams. Thus, your sales and marketing teams need to conduct regular KPI meetings jointly to review, communicate, and recognize the most up-to-date KPIs.

Here are some of the KPIs for better sales and marketing alignment:

• Marketing Qualified Leads: One of the KPI metrics that your sales and marketing team should consider is to track the leads who are more likely to purchase products or services. It helps decide if both teams are in the proper direction for making quality leads.
• Expertise Metrics: Your team must determine the level to which your prospects are seeing and interacting with your thought leadership content. They should evaluate the level of expertise that they’ve established. Examples of expertise metrics are premium content downloads, blog views, and guest post metrics.
• Overall Revenue: Know if both teams are achieving the desired numbers regarding revenue. Every company’s goal is to generate money, so let your teams communicate about the company’s status in earning money.
• Content Audit And Usage: Content is another KPI that your sales and marketing team should assess. How accurate is it? Is it drawing the right personas? Does it fit with your intended buyers? These can be answered by evaluating data.

Final Thoughts

Having the proper alignment between your sales and marketing team allows your company to reap the many benefits it brings. With the right sales and marketing alignment, your company can have more revenue and enhance team efficiency.

Likewise, it’s crucial to know some proven tactics discussed above to achieve such alignment. Remember them and share them with those who may not be aware of such.

Trivia: Read our alignment eBook here.