How to Ensure Marketing and Sales are BFFs

Love-hate relationship? Necessary evil? Consciously uncoupled? How do you describe the relationship between sales and marketing in your organization? If it’s not so hot here are a few benefits that sales and marketing alignment provides to businesses today that might make you reconsider a second chance.

• Ability to close more deals
• Likelihood to lose less customers
• Overall faster growth as an organization

Sounds great, but how do you get there? Every organization is different but successfully aligned sales and marketing teams have focus on four key areas.

Organizational Alignment

Sales and marketing alignment comes from the top down. Leadership commits to working together; developing shared definitions, processes and goals tied to business priorities. Teams meet regularly and have open lines of communication.

Tips for driving organizational alignment:

• Find an executive sponsor
• Job shadow to better understand roles and responsibilities across the aisle
• Create cross functional teams for strategic initiatives
• Develop multiple channels of communications – regular meetings, chat groups, collaborative online spaces
• Be social – find opportunities for marketing and sales to mingle

Technology & Data Alignment

Obvious but crucial to long term success. Each technology in the stack should contribute to demand and revenue creation, and be integrated to eliminate data silos. Organizations who focus on technology alignment can improve their data which leads to better targeting, scoring, and conversion efforts. Technology alignment can also drive efficiency for both teams. It supports closed loop reporting and creates a single source of truth for the organization.

Tips for driving technology & data alignment:

• Audit your marketing, sales and support technologies
• Identify technology gaps or redundancies
• Document the data flows between systems – both from the high-level integration down to the field level data that is mapped
• Create a data dictionary
• Standardize data between systems, reducing open text or free form data where possible

Operational Alignment

This is where the rubber meets the road. Marketing and sales need to define their respective roles and responsibilities for each stage of the funnel. Today prospects can research solutions online more than ever before allowing marketing to engage leads further in the buying process. Campaigns need to be targeted and personalized along the stages to effectively engage and convert unknown prospects to known prospects. Sales and marketing work together to determine when a lead is qualified and should be handed off to keep leads moving through the funnel.

However, marketing’s job does not end once a lead is delivered. Ensuring sales has the right content to convert those leads into opportunities is crucial as well as having the mechanisms in place to re-nurture leads who aren’t quite ready to buy. Mature marketing and sales organizations go beyond the initial sale by developing customer based campaigns to support renewal, cross sell/up sell, and advocacy efforts to retain customers and drive additional revenue.

Tips for driving operational alignment:

• Create buyer personas
• Define buyer journey stages
• Perform a content audit, map content to personas and buying stages
• Define marketing and lead stages, owners, hand offs and service level agreements
• Develop a lead scoring model
• Set up closed loop reporting process to measure ROI
• Create key lifecycle campaigns: welcome programs and reactivation programs are great places to start
• Deploy sales tools to provide insight on lead & contact behavior

Metrics & Goals Alignment

Teams that measure together, stay together. Developing a core set of metrics and dashboards provides common ground for sales and marketing to measure success and optimize programs or processes. Teams should meet regularly to review the data, discuss concerns and celebrate success.

Tips for driving metrics & goals alignment:

• Create goals that are in line with the larger business goals to start, then ladder down to function specific goals
• Create internal benchmarks for KPIs to track against
• Socialize the data – ensure reports and dashboards are accessible to both teams
• Agree on reporting cadence – weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly
• Tailor reports for your audience – executive dashboards will be very different from the operational dashboards

Like any new relationship, its best to learn about each other before jumping into the deep end. Initiate conversations to understand where priorities align and identify areas of collaboration to help develop an action plan.

Also, don’t be afraid to seek advice. There are many experienced professionals who can help your organization navigate this relationship and set you up for success! If you would like to talk with one of our smarketing geeks, contact us!