Sales and marketing groups often work on different sets of projects. While your marketing team might be preparing an ad campaign or coordinating logistics for an upcoming tradeshow sponsorship, your sales team is busy tracking down leads and meeting with potential clients. Although the roles and responsibilities might look drastically different, breaking down the silos between sales and marketing is an essential task for entrepreneurs and business development leaders.
According to Marketing Profs, companies that align their sales and marketing practices generate 208% more revenue from marketing efforts.
How to Align Your Sales & Marketing Teams
As you look for practical ways to begin aligning your sales and marketing teams, here are some valuable tips to keep in mind:
1. Share as much information as possible between teams.
Making sure your sales and marketing teams have access to the same information allows them to make strategic decisions together. For example, marketing insights such as email click-thrus and website visitor tracking can be incredibly insightful information for your sales team. Information about where sales conversations stall, or how long it takes for a decision to be made, allows marketing to identify ways to support business development.
This isn’t about pointing fingers. It’s about using all the information at your disposal to work together for growing your business.
2. Create buyer personas.
Knowing who your ideal customer is, what their pain points are, and how you can uniquely help them is essential for creating an effective buyer’s journey through the sales and marketing process. Your sales and marketing should know (and agree) on exactly who you’re trying to reach.
3. Provide constructive feedback on leads that are generated through marketing.
For marketers honing their lead-generation practices, it’s not enough for salespeople to simply label a lead as “bad.” Sales team members should explain why leads are not a fit so that marketers adapt what they’re doing to help produce better-qualified leads.
4. Encourage the sales department to provide stories of customers that can be leveraged for marketing purposes.
Stories are a powerful sales and marketing tool. Whether it’s a product pitch or a new campaign, framing information into a narrative form makes it much more memorable and effective. Weaving more stories into your strategy creates a natural convergence of sales and marketing departments because each area should depend on the other for a complete picture.
While it might not be a smooth road, continuing to improve alignment between your sales and marketing teams is incredibly valuable. Not only can each team accomplish more when these two teams work together, your business, as a whole, becomes healthier and more profitable.
