Making sure your marketing and sales team are aligned might be the most profitable decision you make this year. Don’t believe me? According to this report, companies with good sales and marketing alignment achieved 20% annual revenue growth.
Making sure your sales and marketing efforts are in alignment is essential for an entrepreneur or business development professional. But how?
5 Questions to Evaluate Sales & Marketing Alignment
Here are five questions to help you determine if your marketing and sales efforts are truly aligned, or if they’re operating in silos:
1. Are your sales and marketing teams meeting regularly?
If your teams aren’t meeting together on a regular basis, there’s no way they can effectively work together. Setting up regular meetings allows marketers to know how sales is doing with their quota and goals while offering support when needed. It also allows the marketing team to share upcoming campaigns, content, and offers that will be promoted.
2. Are you equipping your sales team with content marketing?
Marketers are constantly promoting new offers and content, so it’s important to keep the sales team up to date with these promotions so that they know what recent offers their leads are receiving. If you’re looking for ideas, here are a few ways to equip your sales team with content marketing.
3. Are you leveraging your marketing channels to position salespeople as thought leaders?
Marketers should understand content and social media better than anyone else in the company. Using that knowledge to showcase your sales team’s expertise is a valuable way for the teams to work together. This could include having your marketing team create content on behalf of your sales team, or marketers could teach the sales team how to leverage social media through training classes.
4. Are you constantly sharing important information with each other?
In the same vein as meeting together regularly, it’s important to create a system that allows your sales and marketing teams to share information. One way to achieve this goal is to create an email alias that gets sent to both sales and marketing. Use this strategically to share important information in both directions.
5. Is your sales team informing the content your marketing team creates?
No one knows the challenges and obstacles of your buyers better than your sales team. They also know the common questions that appear during the sales cycle. Sharing this information with marketing so that they can speak into the pain points of the audience and addresses frequently asked questions before sales conversations goes a long way when it comes to creating content that resonates with people.
While there’s no quick fix, there are certainly a number of foundational principles you can take to promote collaboration between sales and marketing. My hope is that these questions would help you identify some potential ways your company can achieve 20% growth through better marketing and sales alignment.
