Marketers have always had a love-hate relationship with sales. But, making sure your sales team feels supported and happy is essential for the relationship to be successful. If your sales team is frustrated with marketing, no one is happy. So, getting to a state of alignment is crucial.
Most marketers have issues aligning with their sales teams to create a true partnership. However, new technology and the evolving roles of both teams have created new obstacles for alignment. The good news is that there are ways to ease these burdens and create a working partnership that creates a better customer experience.
Overcoming the 3 Biggest Obstacles to Marketing & Sales Alignment
Here are three obstacles that marketing leaders find most challenging when it comes to alignment, along with some recommendations to overcome them:
1. Accountability
Being a marketer is tough. You spend a lot of time on lead generation activities, trying to generate new conversations for your sales team. Sales teams who don’t follow up with leads can be one of the biggest frustrations for marketers.
Holding sales teams accountable to follow up with marketing leads starts with making sure both teams understand their roles and expectations. It also requires developing processes and systems that enable both teams to collaborate together, even if it’s for 30 minutes a week. Some teams even put together formal service-level agreements to define the responsibilities of each team.
2. Measuring ROI
Marketers must have confidence that the strategies and tactics you’re investing in are going to help your business group. If you can’t define and quantify the role marketing plays in driving conversations for sales, it’s difficult to understand the contributions you’re making.
In order to measure the ROI of your marketing efforts, both teams must be up-front about what has worked (and what hasn’t). It’s also important to identify the specific marketing metrics that impact sales. Discovering these numbers isn’t always easy on the front end, but it’s important if you want to quantify the ROI of your marketing efforts.
3. Feedback & Data Input
Feedback from your sales team is the only way to know whether or not the leads you’re creating are worth anything. However, getting sales teams to provide feedback or update Salesforce, for instance, can be a considerable challenge.
To get ahead of this, you might need to explain why marketing and sales alignment is important. You might need to educate your sales team on what you need. It’s also important to earn their trust by coming up with quick wins for them.
When sales and marketing teams are on the same page, everyone’s job is much easier. Not only do you optimize your marketing efforts, you also enable sales teams to be more effective by creating a seamless journey from lead to customer.