Having marketing and sales alignment is more important than ever for long-term business success. With many teams working from home, communication is more difficult for even the most aligned companies. Coordinated marketing and sales teams will immediately see benefits in lead generation and quality, ROI of company efforts and more efficient time management.
What is Marketing and Sales Alignment?
Traditionally, marketing and sales teams were siloed within organizations and operating independently. A more effective business model can be to combine pieces of the marketing and sales department. The first step is to open the line of communication between both departments. Encourage your team to set up a weekly meeting where they start discussing marketing content, lead quality and lead pain points. Encouraging the sales side to give feedback on how they determine a qualified lead can help the marketing team ensure the correct information is being passed. From a technical standpoint, integrating the marketing system and CRM database is crucial.
Focus on the Entire Funnel
Work through the potential customer funnel starting from initial pain points your service or product helps solve. Define what a qualified lead looks like for marketing and for sales. This includes clarifying your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) or buyer personas. Can your team define specific customer personas or target accounts down to the data points that identify them? If so, what content pieces would be most helpful to inform and nurture those segments? Well documented personas will streamline the content creation process, ensure resources are allocated properly and facilitate creation of the most effective content.
Define Common Goals
Streamline communication between teams to ensure they are working towards common goals. Are you currently tracking the most meaningful data points and making them readily available for your teams to view? If your team has joint KPIs, it will be more efficient to identify weak areas in the process and optimize. Create an effective dashboard or set of reports to measure the entire funnel and share it with both teams. In weekly meetings, quality and metrics can be discussed to make improvements or reallocate efforts to content and strategy which generate more or better quality leads. Celebrate wins across roles and teams such as number of leads generated, quality of leads, content pieces developed, meetings scheduled and pipeline revenue.
Quick Steps to Implement Your Program
- Open the lines of communication between teams, schedule recurring meetings
- Discuss strategy of the funnel as a whole
- Determine joint KPI’s for the teams to work towards
- Define buyer personas and target accounts
- Optimize gaps between lead generation and the sales cycle
- Review joint KPI’s and optimize program
As mentioned earlier, aligning your marketing and sales teams is crucial to long-term business success and even more important during times of crisis where communication is compromised. Opening the lines of communication between teams and moving forward with defining personas or targets can show immediate improvement in team goals. Joint KPI’s will ensure data points are transparent and readily available to work towards improvement.
Resources:
Is aligning your sales and marketing teams the answer to increasing revenue? Learn how to drive better results by getting your teams on the same page: https://bit.ly/2Zd6fWW (Marketo)
How to Align Sales and Marketing for Results (Not Just Harmony): https://bit.ly/2W2r59K (Hubspot)
Why sales and marketing alignment is critical to organizational success: https://bit.ly/2O9umjh (Super Office)