Editorial
The Gist
- Reframe the narrative. By reframing the narrative from friction to collaboration, sales and marketing can align to meet shared goals and drive business growth.
- Establish shared metrics. Implementing shared goals and metrics between sales and marketing ensures aligned efforts and celebrates combined successes.
- Promote cross-department collaboration. Regular, structured communication and collaboration across departments enhance lead quality and conversion rates.
Few business relationships can be as challenging as those between sales and marketing, especially when sales goals are missed and marketing strategies don’t generate enough leads. An impressively designed new website, a social media flurry, advertising and tradeshow exhibiting are common examples of expensive and time-consuming efforts that often fail to deliver enough new business to even cover their costs.
This highlights the critical need for effective sales and marketing alignment.
Even when the leads are rolling in, the sales team often accuses marketing of not generating enough qualified leads. Marketing then blames sales for not effectively converting the leads they generate.
What if we reframe the narrative? Instead of focusing on friction, let's explore how marketing and sales, along with engineering, operations and the C-suite, can align to tell a cohesive brand story, achieve shared revenue goals, generate more leads and fuel growth.
Prospecting is one of the hardest things to do effectively in all of business, but marketing can make this far easier — do so and not only will the sales and marketing teams be aligned but they might also become good friends. So, how can you do it?
Related Article: Top Strategies for Achieving Marketing & Sales Alignment
5 Steps to Bridging the Gap
The path to sales and marketing alignment requires an understanding of both the symptoms and causes of misalignment, followed by strategic actions to mend the divide. Here are five steps to foster a more harmonious relationship between sales and marketing, ensuring they not only get along but thrive together.
1. Recognizing Symptoms & Causes
Before sales and marketing alignment can occur, it’s important to identify the symptoms of misalignment and understand its root causes. Why is marketing not generating enough leads or why are the leads generated not converting?
Sales and marketing misalignment’s root cause is often due to one of two reasons:
The Wrong Goals
The first root cause of sales and marketing misalignment occurs when marketing sees its purpose as something other than fueling revenue growth through lead generation. Conflicting goals may be to increase overall website traffic, social media followers, or is based on some amount of activity, like posting daily to social media, sending out a monthly newsletter, creating ads for trade publications and putting out more press releases than you have actual news for.
These efforts may successfully generate “leads” but fail to convert at a high rate because they aren’t qualified leads – i.e., leads that represent your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Misunderstanding Value
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The second root cause of sales and marketing misalignment occurs when marketing fails to define your ideal prospects, understand their needs, what problems your solutions solve and how your solutions solve them for prospects – i.e., the value of your solution.
To be effective, the marketing team needs to be trained on your solutions, listen to customers and talk to sales. Only then can marketing create compelling content that articulates the value of your products and services, which will resonate with prospects and generate leads through inbound and outbound marketing efforts.
Related Article: The Secret to Sales and Marketing Alignment: School of Rock
2. Crafting a Unified Brand Story
Compelling content generates leads, which sounds easy but how do you create it?
Once you understand the problems and needs of your ideal customers, it’s important to create messaging that tells the story of your brand:
- What problems you solve.
- Who you solve them for.
- How you solve them.
- Examples of how you solved them.
By researching customers and channel partners, and incorporating feedback from sales, your marketing team can create content that tells this brand story in foundational content — i.e., your home page, about page, solution pages and other web pages — and educational content — i.e., blog posts, press releases, case studies, guides, third-party articles, etc. Foundational content is also educational but needs to explain how your solutions work, where they are the best fit, and what value they provide.
This content also helps prospects answer two key questions:
- What will solve my problem?
- Who is the best fit to solve it?
3. Establishing Shared Goals & Metrics
Sales and marketing alignment is not just about getting along — it's about moving in the same direction. By establishing shared goals and metrics, both teams can work toward common objectives, measure success using the same benchmarks and celebrate victories together.
To generate leads and hit sales goals, marketing must focus on attracting prospects that match your ideal customer profile. Having some form of intent is also the difference between prospects and suspects. Prospects actively search for your solutions, while suspects are potential customers in that they have the characteristics of your ICP, but they’re not actively searching. You need to reach out to them; well-written and targeted emails with the occasional direct mailer is often the best, most-cost-effective strategy.
When marketing is measured by the number of qualified leads generated and converted into sales, alignment between sales, marketing and the C-suite is much easier to achieve.
Note: “sales” from new customers should consider the lifetime value of that customer and not just revenue generated in year one or any other narrowly defined period of time.
4. Encouraging Cross-Departmental Collaboration
Regular, structured communication between sales and marketing is essential that includes getting sales input on:
- What is working well and what isn’t.
- New content to be created.
- Updates to the marketing materials.
- Ideas for new ways to reach prospects.
- Feedback for what marketing is working on.
Meeting monthly or biweekly is a good cadence for staying in communication without taking up too much time.
5. Utilizing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
CRM systems play a crucial role in sales and marketing alignment, especially when set up to provide a unified 360° view of communication with all prospects and customers. When each contact record features all interactions with them (form submissions, live chat interaction, emails opened, notes from calls, meetings and other communication), your CRM will provide you with a clear understanding of where prospects are in the buyer’s journey and what can be done to convert them into sales.
A Unified Future of Growth
By focusing on shared goals, a unified brand story, collaboration, and using a CRM system, sales and marketing alignment can drive business success.
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