Marketing & Sales Alignment: A 4 Step Guide for your Growing Business
- Is 80% of your marketing content not being used by the sales team?
- Do 70-80% of your marketing leads never convert into a sale?
- Is your customer retention metric declining steadily?
Well, you are not alone. A lot of new Businesses face the challenge of ‘Marketing & Sales working in silos as they start growing.
I compare sales and marketing misalignment to a chronic illness. I understand that doesn't sound too great...but, hear me out. Like most chronic illnesses, one of the main concerns associated with marketing & sales misalignment is the inability to diagnose early. Early diagnosis and intervention is the key. If your business is growing (and you wish it could grow better), it’s critical that you don’t ignore the misalignment between sales and marketing.
What has changed for sales and marketing?
- How a customer buys has changed and the old sales techniques no longer work
- Cold calls are not entertained by most of the buyers
- Social selling has become a thing
- Key responsibilities for both the functions have evolved
- Customers depend a lot on their peer group and social circle to make a purchase decision.
- Marketing is no longer limited (if it ever was) to advertising
- Much of the buying process is happening online. Customers these days prefer to contact the organization or love to be contacted by the salespeople after they have done significant research and are more matured in their buying journey. As per Gartner, customers are 57% through the purchase process before they approach a supplier
- For Businesses, the whole process of demand generation and customer acquisition has become more data driven
If your organization is in growth phase, it is the right time to address an already existing or possible sales and marketing misalignment
Why is Marketing & Sales alignment required?
Multiple studies have shown that better Marketing & Sales alignment means:
- Higher Brand Awareness
- More Customers
- More Revenue
- Shorter Sales Cycle
- Better ROI
- Higher Deal Size
- Higher Retention
- More Referrals
How to bring about an alignment between sales and marketing?
STEP 1: Let’s set the basics right
Firstly, let the teams agree on Buyer Personas.
When it comes to Business, knowing who you want to sell to is critical. Not having clarity in this space can lead to ineffective strategies, waste of resources and resentment within teams.
A lot of times, there is a huge gap between how Marketing defines the ideal customer and how Sales defines it.
See if this rings a bell; The sales team gets a big win, but, it doesn’t fit in the criteria that marketing had defined for an ideal buyer, may be because of limited growth opportunities within the account or long term profitability compromise and so on. Or the sales team wants to pursue a deal because doing so could positively impact say another high value deal in the pipeline, but, because that’s not defined in the initial buyer persona structure, multiple emails need to be exchanged between marketing and sales to get on the same page.
Most of this can be avoided by making marketing and sales teams sit together and create an ideal customer persona document together…taking into account each others’ perspectives and rationally analyzing inputs received from customer research and other tools.
Ideal customer persona document should be as detailed as possible capturing all possible details about your idea buyers, right from who they are, how they purchase, what motivates them, what are their challenges, what are their aspirations, who influences their decision, what kind of a role do they have in the buying centre and so on.
The ideal customer persona should be dynamic document and must be available for both the teams to access at any time.
For this to happen, it's important that everyone in the sales and marketing team has access to a single holistic view of the complete customer buying journey.
Now, this is where CRM & marketing automation tools can help you.
These systems like Hubspot, Salesforce etc. give you a complete view of the customer journey. These views and actions taken in regards to each lead are accessible to sales and marketing teams. Lead scoring, routing and nurturing are some of the key things you can achieve with these platforms.
When sales and marketing teams are able to visualize the same customer journey, your customer ends up getting a unified experience and great value.
Also, this alignment should continue all the way into the retention and post sale stage of the customer. A customer’s experience should be well defined and well accepted between sales and marketing teams.
STEP 2: Run after a Common Goal
One of the biggest challenges in aligning sales and marketing teams is that both teams are measured differently.
Sales teams are usually measured on numbers – be it new accounts acquired, upselling or contract renewals. Meanwhile, marketing teams are measured by lead quantity, quality and brand awareness.
Tracking joint KPIs or Key Performance Indicators helps in establishing a synergy between sales and marketing as both teams commit to one common goal, like revenue growth or profit maximization.
You can start by aligning sales & marketing funnel output with your Business objective and then working backwards towards creating customer, opportunity, SQL, MQL & Lead targets. This will give a common starting ground and reference document to both the teams and a shared ownership for the final outcome.
ABM or Account Based Marketing is a great example of how joint ownership & shared KPIs can benefit organizations.
STEP 3: Step into each other’s shoes
This is like working on a marriage (or any relationship for that matter). Each of the two partners can understand the other one's challenges and pain points only if they step into their shoes every now and then.
For marketing & sales alignment, it is important to hold common meetings between sales and marketing teams. Both the teams should be given equal opportunities to share their insights, thoughts and expectations from each other.
As a best practice, a lot of industries see marketing professionals joining sales professionals for customer calls/visits. Similarly, sales professionals sit with marketing teams and understand the direction in which the brand wishes to go for instance or what the next year plan looks like.
Don't invite representatives from each of the two functions to come into other function's meeting to just LISTEN. Instead let the team members LISTEN & CONTRIBUTE.
For instance, one of the most popular B2B marketing strategies used today is content marketing. When used by both sales and marketing teams, content marketing is highly effective at nurturing & guiding prospects through the different stages of the buyer’s journey. It's always a challenge to educate the sales teams on how to use the content.
Now, instead of just holding regular meetings between sales and marketing teams to discuss new content, a great strategy could be to allow salespeople to guide new content development by contributing their ideas and perspectives. With that in place, you can literally have both the teams rooting for the same set of ideas and owning the outcomes even before the ideas are put into action.
STEP 4: Drive from the top
All cultural reforms must be driven from the top. Unless this happens, we can't expect the teams to imbibe the culture and act in accordance.
The alignment thought must first be internalized by the leadership team. It should reflect in how achievements are recognized and how failures are diagnosed as a team. Once we have the team at the top living and breathing the change, acceptance of the same as a cultural aspect becomes a lot easier.
Having in place, a feedback mechanism, led by the team at the top, helps strengthen the alignment between marketing and sales teams.
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