Sales and marketing are dual engines that drive business growth. Marketing generates demand, attracts prospects, and converts them into customers, while sales focuses on closing deals and building lasting relationships. For a business to thrive, aligning these two crucial functions is essential.
The alignment of marketing and sales goes beyond mere collaboration. Strategically, both teams should align with the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), particularly in an Account-Based Management (ABM) approach and create shared Marketing and Sales Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that feed into the overall business Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Tactically, this means developing coordinated activities and approaches to achieve those OKRs. Operationally, alignment enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of lead generation and conversion processes.
In this article, we explore the essential steps to aligning your sales and marketing teams, creating a seamless customer journey, and ultimately driving revenue growth. Discover how to integrate your strategies, define a unified customer persona, implement a "marketing first" approach, track joint KPIs, maintain consistent messaging, and more. Aligning these teams is not just beneficial—it's imperative for sustainable success in today's B2B landscape.
The Evolution of Sales and Marketing
Today, sales are integrated into the broader marketing mix. This shift has occurred because customer habits have evolved, rendering traditional sales techniques ineffective. Now, much of the purchase process happens online:
- 92% of B2B buyers start with a search. Forrester
- 93% of B2B buyers find that going online and searching is superior to interacting with a salesperson. Forrester
- 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make purchasing decisions. IDC
- 90% of customers won't answer the phone anymore. MARTECH
Additionally, the sales and marketing funnel has evolved. With sales automation tools and marketing technology (MarTech), businesses can now gather extensive data on prospects, making the process more data-driven. The funnel has shifted from being sales-driven to marketing-driven.
Aligning Sales and Marketing Teams for Revenue Growth
To align your sales and marketing teams, it's essential to understand that the relationship between these departments should not be viewed as a division where marketing simply passes tasks onto sales. Instead, both teams must operate under a cohesive customer acquisition strategy. This unified approach ensures that all efforts are directed toward common goals, fostering collaboration and enhancing overall efficiency.
To align your sales and marketing teams, we've outlined steps to improve how your company can interact with, inform, and serve customers.
1. Create a Unified Customer Journey
The first step to aligning your sales and marketing departments is restructuring the entire customer journey to eliminate siloed experiences for prospects. Aim for a cohesive brand experience that begins at the awareness stage and continues through to brand loyalty. This unified approach allows your team to track prospects throughout the entire funnel.
One of the biggest challenges in creating a single customer experience is obtaining a holistic view of the customer. This is where marketing technology plays a crucial role. The most effective technologies for companies with strong sales and marketing alignment include CRM systems, analytics, and marketing automation. CRM software enables teams to act quickly and deliver more value at every stage of the customer journey.
Implementing the right systems and technologies will help bridge the gap between the marketing data collected about a prospect and their conversion into leads and sales opportunities.
2. Agree on a Customer Persona
Knowing your target audience is critical for both sales and marketing. Without a clear understanding of the ideal customer, strategies can become ineffective, leading to a disconnect between teams.
Sales may aim to attract anyone with purchasing power, while marketing might focus on a more specific approach. To ensure alignment, sales and marketing should collaborate to create an ideal customer persona document.
This document will define the type of customer you should target, considering factors such as company size, industry, and experience. By working together, sales and marketing can gain a comprehensive understanding of who your ideal customers are, what they seek, and their biggest challenges.
Understanding these challenges is crucial because failing to address their needs is one of the primary reasons companies struggle to onboard and acquire potential customers. The ideal customer persona (ICP) should be a dynamic document, frequently discussed and shared between sales and marketing teams.
3. Use a "Marketing First" Approach
When sales and marketing are not aligned, each team often targets different customer groups, leading to inconsistent messaging and efforts. Marketing may launch campaigns aimed at one audience, while sales may cold call or email another group.
Prospects will not respond positively to cold calls or sales emails if they are unfamiliar with your brand, which can decrease your chances of closing deals.
Successful sales and marketing teams adopt a "marketing first" approach. This strategy involves marketers identifying potential customers with specific problems and demonstrating how your product or service can solve them.
The process begins with marketing warming up and nurturing new leads by sharing valuable information about the product or service and highlighting its features and benefits. Once the lead is well-informed and ready to decide, the sales team can step in to close the deal.
4. Track Both Sales and Marketing KPIs
Sales and marketing teams often measure different metrics. Sales teams typically focus on new accounts, and deals closed or contract renewals, while marketing teams measure lead quantity, lead quality, and brand awareness. This discrepancy can lead to misalignment
To synchronise your sales and marketing departments, consider measuring joint key performance indicators (KPIs). This unites both teams under a common goal, highlighting the synergy between their efforts and providing a comprehensive view of business performance. Tracking joint KPIs helps identify and address weak points in your customer acquisition funnel.
Schedule meetings between marketing and sales to facilitate collaboration and agreement on shared metrics, such as revenue growth. This active collaboration ensures both teams are working towards the same objectives and enhancing overall performance.
5. Keep Marketing Messages Consistent
Inconsistent messaging between sales and marketing can confuse potential customers and harm your company's reputation. For instance, if the sales team calls a product one thing while the marketing team refers to it differently on the website, it creates confusion and mistrust.
Consistent messaging is a significant benefit of an aligned sales and marketing team. When both teams are aligned, marketing messages can effectively warm up prospects, preparing them for the sales team, which will reinforce those messages to close the deal. If marketing messages resonate, the sales team can use them to close more deals.
Without consistency, you risk creating a fractured message that leads to an uncomfortable and inconsistent journey for potential customers. If prospects receive mixed signals from marketing and sales, it can negatively impact your results. Ensure that your messaging is consistent across the entire customer journey to maintain trust and coherence. Align your teams to deliver a unified message, making the customer experience seamless and reliable.
6. Create Marketing Assets to Close the Sale
Content marketing is a popular and effective B2B strategy, with over 90% of marketers incorporating it into their digital marketing efforts. When utilised by both sales and marketing teams, content marketing can nurture prospects through various stages of the sales funnel. However, many sales reps are unsure what content to send to prospects, leading to wasted efforts.
One of the most common complaints from sales teams is the lack of clarity on how to use the content created by marketing. In contrast, aligned sales and marketing teams know exactly how to leverage content effectively.
In high-alignment organisations, sales teams use content strategically rather than sharing it sporadically. By creating targeted content assets, such as product sheets, white papers, downloadable guides, or benchmark reports, marketing can help move prospects through the sales funnel. This approach ensures that content pushes customers from one stage to the next in the sales process.
Encouraging sales teams to generate content ideas ensures their buy-in and enhances the effectiveness of the content created, ultimately improving the alignment between sales and marketing.
7. Join Forces on Post-Sale Growth and Retention
Aligning your sales and marketing teams can effectively attract new leads and convert them into paying customers. However, there's even more to gain from this alignment, especially when teams work together to grow and retain customers. By focusing only on acquiring customers, you might miss out on potential profits from your current customer base.
To maximise customer lifetime value, sales and marketing should collaborate closely. Once a new customer is acquired, the marketing team should shift its focus from attracting new clients to growing and retaining existing ones. This involves encouraging customers to stay with your business, try new products, upgrade their current product, or add more licenses.
During this phase, the sales team should be prepared to step in and support these efforts at any time. By working together, marketing and sales can create a seamless post-sale experience that enhances customer experience and loyalty, driving long-term growth and profitability.
8. Implement Closed-Loop Reporting
Finally, closed-loop reporting should be implemented to close the feedback loop between sales and marketing through a data-driven approach. This involves tracking leads from initial engagement through the sales process to conversion. By sharing data and feedback on lead quality and outcomes, both teams can continually refine their strategies, improving lead generation and conversion rates.
Closed-loop reporting also allows for more accurate attribution of leads to specific marketing efforts, helping allocate resources more effectively. Meetings and data analysis sessions between sales and marketing are crucial for making closed-loop reporting a seamless and beneficial process. This alignment ensures that both teams work collaboratively to optimise their performance and drive business success.
Aligning your sales and marketing teams is crucial for driving business success. When these teams work in harmony, you can attract, convert, and retain customers more effectively, leading to increased revenue and growth.
gigCMO can help you achieve this alignment with our Fractional CMO Service. Our marketing leadership is driven by a comprehensive growth playbook and supported by expert knowledge transfer, ensuring your sales and marketing teams are integrated and high-performing.
Contact gigCMO for a free consultation, and let us guide you in building a cohesive team that delivers the highest return on marketing investment (ROMI).
