The alignment between the sales and marketing departments is called Smarketing. It represents an agreement between two teams who share a system of communication, goals, and strategy. It allows sales and marketing teams to drive efforts to deliver a seamless experience to customers, increase conversion rate, and boost revenue.
Unfortunately, many startups and small businesses have sales and marketing teams working in silos. And this negatively impacts a company’s ability to convert new customers and grow long-term. Often, siloed teams will have the marketing team sitting on top of the funnel, and sales will own the bottom. Once a lead is ready for sales, it could be handed off, and, in many cases, they would not hear from marketing again.
But, following this linear process adds no value to modern businesses that operate in tight, competitive space. Consumers have ongoing interactions with brands before, during, and after a sale. Alignment is critical to providing a consistent customer experience throughout the lifecycle.
Common training
Sales and marketing teams that work in siloes often have different types of training. For instance, a marketing team may be working on a campaign with a different agenda, and a sales kickoff may target a different goal. Unfortunately, this is counter-productive to company growth.
Therefore, training and educating both departments together is necessary. This enables learning from each other’s experiences and a better understanding of how their roles integrate into the overall business strategy.
Common training for sales and marketing teams can take place in the form of formal courses, seminars, webinars, and workshops. Such training provides teams with the resources to stay informed on industry trends, develop new strategies, and refresh their knowledge of their company’s products or services.
Match the training they need to do the skills their job demands. For instance, your sales kickoff could be about customer service, communication, negotiation, product knowledge, and innovative sales techniques. The marketing team should gain access to knowledge about lead acquisition, competitor marketing tactics, digital and offline marketing, etc.
On the other end, both sales and marketing teams should receive training on topics such as problem-solving, public speaking, writing skills, time management, critical thinking, project management, collaboration skills, presentation skills, teamwork skills, IT literacy, financial literacy, data analysis skills, customer relationship management (CRM), etc.
Knowing each other’s roles within the organization can help both teams practice what they have learned and demonstrate their skills in mock or role-play scenarios. The team should also have the opportunity to review their performance regularly to ensure they are continually improving based on acquired training.
Integrate marketing automation with your CRM
Integrating marketing automation with your CRM can help drive efficiency and effectiveness in your marketing efforts. Automating marketing tasks such as lead nurturing, segmentation, and customer journeys can help streamline your processes and free up time for more strategic activities.
The right integration between the sales and marketing teams can help track customer interactions across channels. This provides a better understanding of the customer lifecycle and identifies opportunities to engage with them further. Implementing a marketing automation solution should follow CRM software and can help automate marketing activities.
This allows marketing to better support sales in various ways, including—
- Creating a lead-scoring system
- Sending out automated task notifications
- Tracking customer behaviors to understand their interests and buying habits better, and
- Launching automated multichannel marketing campaigns to bring in more leads.
Integrating your CRM with a marketing automation solution is important so that data from both systems live in the same database. This lets the sales and marketing team view and works with the same data, enhancing alignment.
Moreover, these days, businesses often rely on an all-in-one CRM system due to its inclusion of a built-in marketing automation solution. Such a blend eliminates the need for two separate systems and the time required to integrate them.
Share common goals
Aligning sales and marketing is key to success. This might include increasing customer loyalty or improving customer satisfaction ratings. Both teams need to understand these goals so that they achieve the same outcomes. Team leaders often need to motivate members through financial rewards or recognition for meeting benchmarks.
Once incentives are in place, it will be easier for sales and marketing team members to collaborate on achieving their goals. Both departments should work together on strategies to drive growth in their respective areas of expertise while helping the business reach its overall objectives. Put in a unified approach where each team can capitalize on the other’s strengths and compensate for weaknesses in certain areas of expertise.
When sales and marketing teams collaborate toward common objectives through experimentation, it improves meaningful connections. In turn, this can boost sales, productivity, and revenue. For a successful partnership between the two teams, it is essential to establish achievable goals that form the basis for a strong collaboration.
Effective communication and unified strategy
Effective communication between the sales and marketing teams can ensure that everyone understands what each team is working on and how they can best support one another. Working in tandem requires sales and marketing departments to establish communication channels allowing regular, ongoing dialogue.
Often, this involves weekly meetings, monthly reports, and regular email exchanges where teams can discuss progress on various projects or campaigns. Promoting inter-departmental communication should encompass understanding needs and offering assistance when possible. Additionally, communication must remain ongoing so that everyone across the department remains aware of changes in strategies or tactics that may affect their work.
Both teams should be involved in creating an integrated plan that outlines how they will work together to achieve common goals. For instance, a shared calendar allows everyone to plan activities and tasks together while identifying codependencies beforehand.
Shared KPIs
Another important aspect of aligning sales and marketing is creating shared KPIs (key performance indicators). Begin with establishing KPIs that are measurable, realistic, and relevant to teams’ goals. These KPIs help ensure that sales and marketing teams work together towards the same outcome and can provide feedback to inform strategic decisions.
Such an approach enables teams to discover areas where one team may outperform the other. This helps take steps to leverage optimal performance across both departments as they share the same set of values between them.
Mutually shared KPIs allow team members to work towards a common vision and be open to each other’s methods and approaches. It helps break down existing silos between both teams and encourages them to collaborate better on organizational initiatives. For example, a KPI for the sales team might be the number of leads converted, and marketing KPIs involve the number of leads acquired.
Common KPIs help keep both teams accountable. For instance, bring in a lead-to-win rate or average cost per lead.
Conclusion
Sales and marketing alignment within an organization is essential to keep everyone on the same page. In the long run, this can help streamline your business’s services and initiatives. Such alignment also increases the organization’s efficiency and effectiveness when pursuing strategic goals.
A streamlined and collaborative process between sales and marketing teams adds value to customers. Continuously aligning customer needs promotes crafting campaigns that engage customers and offer unmatched customer experience.
Implement the above-mentioned strategies if your business needs to align sales and marketing teams. You can start with one at a time and see how it affects key business metrics like sales, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty.
Author Bio
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
