Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Ross and Rachel… like all great pairings, the relationship between sales and marketing doesn’t always follow a smooth path.
At the start of my career I worked as a marketing manager in a small team. I was an integral part of sales with my own sales targets and our partnership led to huge growth. That’s why to me it’s a no-brainer that sales and marketing must go hand in hand.
For many organisations however sales and marketing are often deeply misaligned. A recent study by LinkedIn Customer Insights Team highlighted that the average alignment is as low as 16%, with the majority of companies’ sales and marketing teams working in silos and not talking to the same audience in a joined-up manner. It’s not industry specific either – from tech to manufacturing, it’s a similar story.
“Aligning sales and marketing presents a large growth opportunity to organisations, when these teams align with common goals they see on average a 15% uplift in profitability and 19% faster revenue growth*”
Here are my top recommendations on where to focus your attention to ensure optimal sales and marketing alignment:
1. Align your goals and strategies. Having common objectives and outcomes is key to creating traction – if the marketing strategy is to generate net new customers, but the sales strategy is to grow existing customers then this will cause friction. As part of the sales and marketing strategy clearly define the role and responsibilities of each team and what they are accountable for, e.g. sales are responsible for selling and lead conversion; marketing own brand awareness and lead generation. As part of your marketing strategy ensure you have a plan in place for lead management, scoring and prioritising leads before they are passed to the account teams – that will help to build trust, and deliver value.
It’s vital you and the teams embody these goals and strategies and everyone is held accountable. Allowing a demand generation campaign to go ahead because of pipeline issues, when it doesn’t meet your goals will cause instant friction between the teams.
2. Partner with sales throughout the customer journey. All too often marketing will work hard to hand over a ton of leads, and then ask Sales what happened to them. But the sales teams won’t see everything that marketing is doing behind the scenes to help those leads progress. Get their input on key elements like personas so that both teams are aligned on who the target audience is and how they are communicated to. Ensure content is unified and tailored to each stage of the funnel and resonates with customers. Scheduling regular meetings and workshops to gain feedback and review challenges will help to foster a culture of collaboration and partnership.
3. Standardise terminology and tools. Start with the basics, make sure a common language is used across both teams and that the meaning is shared. Having shared processes is critical to optimum alignment, if your processes are misaligned, use this as an opportunity to reengineer with input from both teams to start building them. Think about sales enablement for your marketing campaigns, and empower them with the tools they need to speak and engage with customers.
4. Share the wins and celebrate together, recognising the part that each of the team has played in achieving the goal. A simple but often overlooked aspect, particularly when the sales cycle is long and complex.
Regardless of industry, a misaligned sales and marketing team can’t deliver what your organisation needs. Aligning your marketing campaigns with sales goals and strategies should be a top priority and represents a huge opportunity for business growth. See how we can help you on your alignment journey with sales here or speak to me about some of the ways we’ve helped sales and marketing teams align and the results we’ve achieved.
