Business owners will have heard it before: sales blaming marketing, and marketing blaming sales.
In fact, 50% of sales representatives feel that the marketing department doesn’t understand their customer base.¹
This is true whether the marketing team is in-house or an external agency. In both instances, alignment is achievable and immensely profitable.
The Cost of Misalignment
Take the time to think about how much your business spends on marketing.
Now think about how much you spend on sales.
Finally, consider that a study by HubSpot found that companies with strong sales and marketing alignment see a 208% increase in revenue.²
How to Align Sales & Marketing
The following steps will help you to get sales and marketing working together.
- Collaborative Strategy
Ensure that when designing a sales strategy, key marketing people are involved; and vice versa. - Accurate Tracking
When new leads are generated and later progress through the pipeline, you should be able to track them back to the channel, campaign, ad imagery, ad copy and call-to-action that captured the lead. - CRM
A good CRM, used properly and shared between the two functions brings the above tracking to life and combines it with sales insights. - Reporting and Reviews
Regularly looking at sales opportunities in the context of how they originated will allow a business to reverse engineer wins, and move on from ineffective campaigns and sales processes.
Establish a Collaborative Culture
The steps above will help to get sales and marketing working together, but it’s all for nothing if there’s a siloed company culture.
Make sure that marketing is recognised when new deals close, and sales are recognised when their insights lead to better campaigns.
Summary
Although these points might seem obvious, most businesses are failing to align their sales and marketing functions.
So in managing your sales department and marketing department (in-house or agency) ensure you have the right people that are committed to a collaborative strategy.
