Did you know that aligning your sales and marketing can help your business become 67% better at closing deals? Or that companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate? There is countless research and data available that shows just how important and beneficial aligning your sales and marketing can be for your organisation, yet only 8% of companies have a strong alignment between their sales and marketing departments. The truth is, there is often a lot of internal miscommunication between sales and marketing, which results in lost leads and a loss of revenue. Yet when marketing and sales are aligned and work together, you’ll not only witness better communication within your organisation, but as data shows, you will also see an increase in sales. When attempting to align your sales and marketing team for the first time, it can be confusing and overwhelming. The purpose of this article is to educate you on the benefits of aligning your sales and marketing teams, and what you need to do to get your teams aligned.
The Benefits of Bringing Your Sales and Marketing into Alignment
Traditionally, sales and marketing teams have worked autonomously. However, they’re both working towards the same end goal: revenue. Previously, there hasn’t been a coordinated effort to work together on both the lead generation and closing of leads, which means both teams weren’t understanding each other and how they can better contribute to the overall business objectives. These days, the successful organisations are breaking down the barriers to align sales and marketing efforts and improve results. Here are some of the remarkable benefits of bringing your sales and marketing into alignment.
Better results from marketing and sales efforts
When your marketing and sales team are not aligned, each team carries out its own activities without paying attention to what the other team is doing. This more often than not leads to unnecessary efforts and confusing experiences for prospects. Conversely, when your sales and marketing are aligned, there’s little room for confusion or redundant activities. When the two teams regularly interact and brainstorm together, the impact of their efforts is amplified. When both your sales and marketing teams work together, each campaign you launch will have the highest impact possible.
Improved customer experience
Both marketing and sales are responsible for generating revenue. Marketing’s role is to attract and convert qualified leads, and Sale’s role is to close those leads into customers. For this reason, it’s vital both teams work together to create accurate buyer personas. An agreed-upon understanding of the customer encourages shared ownership of the customer experience, which results in prospects being less likely to experience a fragmented buying experience. As marketing and sales interact with their prospects and learn more about their buying habits they should share this insight with each other. When both teams share their customer insights, they’ll be able to improve the customer experience which will result in higher conversion rates. After all, the more insights you have about your customers’ buying behaviours, interests, goals and pain-points, the more relevant you can make their experience with your organisation .
A more effective strategy
83% of companies who have aligned sales and marketing teams believe their strategy is effective. It is important to have both teams involved with, and supporting the overall strategy to ensure the success of both marketing and sales activities. For example if it is marketing’s responsibility to generate 50 qualified leads per week to sales, they need to discuss and agree on what defines a qualified lead. Similarly, if it is sales responsibility to follow up with all the leads both teams need to discuss and agree on what is the best way to follow up with the leads. Working together will ensure the success of each team and ultimately the organisation.
An accurate understanding of what is important to your customers
Accurately understanding your buyer’s journey is critical for the growth and bottom line of any organisation. As both marketing and sales are involved with customers from their first touch point with your organisation to close, it is important that both are involved with and agree on the buyers’ journey. An accurate mapping of the buyers’ journey will drive successful marketing campaigns and sales processes as they are relevant to what customers are looking for at each stage of the buyers’ journey.
