Elevate your Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and Marketing alignment is key in any organization. Knowing what kind of information is necessary at which step, having alerts and scoring in place to help communicate to sales where the lead is in the process and when they are ready to buy. Trial and error will ultimately help you to fine tune the scoring models and alert you to get your demand generation program running like a well-oiled machine!

What does misalignment look like?

If your organization is experiencing any of the symptoms below, your organization is likely suffering from a disjointed sales and marketing process. It may not feel like ‘suffering’ in the moment, but the established processes that you have will not be scalable for growth.

No buyers' personas established
No common lead database or Contact Relationship Management (CRM) tool
No established process for lead handoff from marketing to sales
Each salesperson has their own “processes”
Reporting is overly complicated
Sales complains that they don’t get enough leads
Marketing complains that sales isn’t following up on the leads
Many leads falling through the cracks
Marketing isn’t notified when sales close a deal

The list goes on, but you get my point. I recently read an article which coined the term “Smarketing,” which I loved. This is a good goal for any organization, whether you have one salesperson and one marketing person, or fifty. Establishing common goals, processes, and sharing successes will be key to growing sales and fostering a happy team.

Get Sales and Marketing Alignment

Often when dealing with multiple sales team members who have different preferences and processes. It is important that everyone gets behind the demand generation program or they won’t realize the value.

Here are some tips from my own experience to get your team aligned the first time.

Develop a common process and definitions

There are so many theories on sales and marketing processes and funnels and stages. Ultimately, you need to pick one that resonates with your industry and your internal sales processes and stick with it. There are many definitions and understandings of what a prospect is, or what an SAL is, pick one that resonates with your team and go with it! Teach your team, document it for onboarding, review it regularly to make sure it still makes sense. But don't get too bogged down in arguing and changing processes with every book you read! There are a lot of opinions, pick the one that makes sense to your organization.

Really sell the automations and time saving elements

Each salesperson has an opinion on what marketing should be doing. Usually, they want some piece of collateral and if they had that, they could sell anything. Well, what they really need is automation. Learn what about the sales process they find onerous, areas where they waste too much time, and try to improve this with your demand generation program. A well established sales process will improve win rates by up to 24%. ‍

Don’t get the teams bogged down in the weeds of scoring

You can get really scientific with your scoring. And once you have needed out developing a really cool scoring program, you want to tell everyone about it. Resist the urge. Share this with your marketing team and friends, but don’t worry the sales team about this. At the end of the day, you need to pick an arbitrary number that once a lead reaches that score, they are considered well nurtured and ready to hand off. That number can be 100 or it can be simple like 5. It might take 5 activities to reach that number, with different weighting on different assets, but try not to complicate it.

Establish Common KPIs and Goals

Nothing brings a team together better than a common goal (or enemy!). At the end of the day, none of you will have a job without revenue and both marketing and sales make massive contributions to generating revenue. So, this is probably a good place to start. When establishing KPIs, I always advise customers to start at the top. What metrics do you need to report up? Once that is established, create a path from your daily marketing and sales efforts until you reach that metric, and make that your combined goal.

Get customer support on board

Ultimately, making your customers happy is free marketing. Check in with them, capture feedback, involve them in your marketing, communicate updates, new products, training, etc. Reward your customers and make them feel special. You can hire a whole team to do this, or you can work with support and try to automate this process.

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See the results

Sharing success, regular meetings, marketing involvement in sales activities, sales involvement in marketing campaigns are all other ways that this well-oiled machine needs to work together. The key to sales and marketing alignment is ensuring that everyone has a chair at the table. Neither side should impose a process on the other.

Want to start your journey to sales and marketing nirvana? We can help! Book a call today!