Kristin Luck
Sales and Marketing alignment is a must! Countless articles, blogs, and podcasts emphasize the importance of aligning sales and marketing teams, highlighting the negative impact on revenues when these efforts aren’t aligned. Note that companies can incur a cost of 10% or more of annual revenue due to misalignment between sales and marketing.
So how to get it right? Here are five key strategies to ensure your sales and marketing engine is humming:
1. Sales and Marketing Alignment Starts From the Top Down
If different leaders oversee sales and marketing (as they often do), ensure that you strategically align these roles and work toward the same key organizational objectives. Unfortunately, this challenge arises when both a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) typically have a lifecycle of less than 3 years. Keep in mind, if a CRO doesn’t believe in the value of marketing or a CMO doesn’t respect the sales process, you’ve placed the wrong folks in these seats.
2. Understand the Buyer
According to Marketing Sherpa, 61% of B2B marketers send leads directly to sales. However, only 27% of these leads are qualified! This is a real productivity suck for sales. Developing key client personas and competitor kill sheets present key collaboration opportunities for sales and marketing. Ensure both teams are aligned on who your key buyers are and co-create a strategy that converts leads to sales, which ultimately, will set both teams up for success.
3. Ensure Roles are Clearly Defined and Get the Process Right
Navigating the marketing to sales handoff is tricky at best. To address this challenge, utilize technology-driven processes and reporting rigor to ensure that any marketing qualified leads (MQL’s) delivered by marketing to sales are promptly and consistently followed up on. Sales too often disregards marketing leads, leading to a lack of follow-up and low conversion rates. A benefit of true sales and marketing alignment is MQL conversions that drive revenue growth.
4. Agree on the Balance Between Demand Generation and Account-Based Marketing Strategies
Generating new client demand is important; however, equally crucial is nurturing existing client relationships for growth. Unfortunately, too often, sales and marketing solely focus on getting new clients through the door, only to see them leave because they haven’t properly nurtured the relationship. Good sales and marketing alignment ensures that once clients get in the door, they are given the proper attention throughout their entire experience.
A holistic sales and marketing practice addresses the entire client lifecycle.
5. Meet Regularly for Sales and Marketing Alignment
As in weekly. Sales and marketing CONNECTEDNESS is a big component of sales and marketing alignment. Additionally, teams naturally collaborate more effectively when they feel connected. Therefore, meeting regularly as a group is imperative. Ensure your sales and marketing teams are connected digitally, and make certain that regular updates go out to/from both teams.
Here are some strategies to boost sales and marketing productivity.
Remember... there is nothing as time-consuming and expensive as muscling through sales without the help of a solid marketing practice. Sales and marketing alignment is key to driving brand awareness, prospect engagement and lead generation.