Any company serious about meeting the challenges of the rapidly-evolving marketplace cannot afford to let either their sales or marketing departments do things their own way anymore.

Now more than ever, there’s a need for better integration between all the departments in a company and not only in sales and marketing.

In this post, we’ll be looking at why the marketing-sales alignment is necessary and ways you can go about it

Stats that show why you need to align your sales and marketing strategies

The main reason why the market sphere is buzzing with sales and marketing (or smarketing) alignment is because this strategy creates a better revenue stream for companies.

This claim about higher revenue is valid, and Hubspot has some interesting stats to back it up:

  • Not aligning sales and marketing processes and technologies caused B2B companies to lose 10{d276928901c57b7062185aaa9552c09c7de7b924056fa01df854cf39d287b879} or more of their revenue every year.
  • Companies that have effective smarketing practices were able to generate over 208{d276928901c57b7062185aaa9552c09c7de7b924056fa01df854cf39d287b879} from their marketing efforts.
  • Companies whose sales and marketing staff team up, see their customer retention reach as high as 36{d276928901c57b7062185aaa9552c09c7de7b924056fa01df854cf39d287b879}, and their sales win rates increase by 38{d276928901c57b7062185aaa9552c09c7de7b924056fa01df854cf39d287b879}.

After going through these stats, if you’re thinking about what steps to take to align your company’s sales and marketing strategies, then keep reading.

Best practices for sales & marketing alignment Effective Data sharing

The first step you should take when aligning your sales and marketing divisions is to let the two divisions share the same data.

Similarly, by making it possible for marketing departments to view the feedback of sales personnel, the marketing team can create better content for prospects.

To streamline data sharing between your sales and marketing department, it’s best to use cloud-based storage as it allows for easy sharing of various types of data – conference logs, statistics, documents, etc.

Have your marketing team occasionally participate in the sales process

Another effective way to make your sales and marketing divisions respect each other’s roles and create better alignment is to have them swap roles occasionally.

By having the marketing team participate in sales calls, it gives them more insight into the challenges and pain points of customers than any research could.

Furthermore, marketing teams get to experience first-hand the challenges faced by the sales team. This knowledge helps the marketing team to craft more compelling content that would assist salespeople to easily close deals.

Raise performance with service level agreement (SLA)

It’s not unusual to hear sales teams complain that their marketing teams are giving them leads that are hard to convert. On the other hand, marketers point accusing fingers right back at sales teams, saying they aren’t following up on the leads they are given.

To clear up this type of accusation or other forms of confusion that could cause a misalignment between your sales and marketing departments, have the two parties sign an SLA.

An SLA is a document that states the objectives and responsibilities that each department will fulfill within a month. Let your SLA highlight each role of your sales and marketing teams throughout the lead-to-sales cycle.

Also, it’s good for an SLA to contain information like conversion time-frames, when marketing will transfer a lead to sales, and other vital information.

Cross-funnel content

Cross-funnel content is all about giving customers a unified, consistent experience throughout a brand – on websites, social media, word-of-mouth recommendations, emails, and mobile apps.

Since sales and marketing depend on content to perform their tasks in the conversion funnel, then there’s a need to create cohesive content across the entire lead-to-sales channel.

Face-to-face communication

Create opportunities for sales and marketing personnel to interact face to face so the two teams can build a more understanding relationship. This opportunity also allows for better understanding of each other’s perspective.

It is important to make your sales and marketing teams realize that they’re working to achieve similar goals, and they’re not in competition with each other.

Having this mindset would encourage the two teams to work together more seamlessly.

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