One of the most reliable ways to beat your competition and boost revenue is by ensuring your marketing and sales departments are aligned. When your sales and marketing teams work hand-in-hand, the hands-off process becomes more seamless, which leads to better customer experience, better conversion rates, and increased customer retention. 

One of the recent studies found out that successfully aligned marketing and sales teams generated 32% more revenue and retained 36% more customers than sales and marketing teams that were poorly aligned. These numbers make the significance of sales and marketing alignment very clear. 

To help you improve your sales and marketing alignment, we have put together 10 best practices you can use to ensure the successful implementation of this strategy. 

Let’s dive in right away!

1.  Understand your customers first 

Every sales and marketing alignment strategy you try to build will be worthless if you don’t have a clear understanding of your customers and how they buy. You should start by using data about your previous customers from analytics and reports. This data is readily available in your CRM and marketing automation platform if you are using one. 

With these details, it will be pretty easy to set realistic and attainable marketing and sales goals. It will also be much easier to create the right sales and marketing processes when you have an idea about the behavior of your customers. 

2.  Clearly define the roles and deliverables for each team 

You don’t need to get into a situation where one team blames the other for not doing what they were supposed to do. The roles and goals for both marketing and sales need to be clear to avoid confusion about who is supposed to do what. If some of these roles are shared, there should be a mechanism to ensure the two teams work together to achieve the shared goals. 

3.  Use a common language in both marketing and sales

While dealing with prospects and customers, it is essential for both your sales and marketing teams to communicate in a consistent manner. The goal is to ensure the customer doesn’t even notice that the person they are talking to has changed. This is achievable when there is an effective hand-off process between marketing and sales. 

4.  The tools used by both teams should communicate 

If you want to have a perfect alignment between your sales and marketing teams, you need to ensure the tools used by both teams seamlessly communicate and share data. This makes it much easier for marketing and sales to exchange important reports and feedback that may be of value to both teams. 

For instance, if you are using HubSpot Marketing Hub for your marketing, choosing HubSpot Sales Hub would be the best option for sales since these two tools are designed to seamlessly share data. 

5.  Take advantage of marketing and sales SLAs. 

If you want to have harmony and perfect alignment between your sales and marketing, you need a reliable accountability mechanism for both teams. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used as a commitment between the two teams to ensure each of them plays their roles. For instance, you may have a condition in your SLAs that requires sales to respond to all leads handed over to them within a certain period. 

Having SLAs takes away blame games that might arise when one of the two teams doesn’t play their role right. 

6.  Create a perfect leads hand-off process

The process of handing over leads from marketing to sales is one of the most crucial things that need to be attended to when aligning sales and marketing. There needs to be a clearly defined process that your sales and marketing teams follow. This will eliminate the friction of who is supposed to do what when it comes to lead management, nurturing, and closing. 

Some of the questions that your hand-off process needs to address include; who is responsible for what? What are the attributes of sales-qualified lea? What parameters are used to attach scores to leads? And many more. 

7.  Both teams should have an input in content creation 

Content creation is typically a role for the marketing team. However, if you are to have a perfect alignment between sales and marketing, it is essential to ensure your sales team contributes something to the content published. 

Your sales team needs to share customers’ feedback about your products and brand with marketing. This feedback can be used to create content that addresses some of the questions and issues that customers may have. 

8.  Have aligned goals

Your marketing and sales teams are all working towards generating more revenue for the business. One of the best ways to achieve this is to ensure both teams have goals that are mutually beneficial. For example, if your marketing team sends over sales-ready leads to sales, the conversion rate will likely go up. So, having a goal that requires marketing to prepare leads to be sales-ready will help sales meet its goal of closing more deals. 

9.  Marketers should listen to sales calls. 

Most of the tools used by sales allow them to record all the phone calls they have with customers. So, why should marketing listen to these conversions? Your marketing team needs to listen to these calls to know whether the leads they sent to sales were actually sales-ready. This information can also be used to improve the lead scoring process. 

10.  Regular meetings between sales and marketing

Your sales and marketing teams should meet at least once a week to share feedback about the progress and challenges in their respective departments. It doesn’t have to be the entire team; a few team leaders can represent each department. These meetings should also be used to brainstorm ideas of how each department can make the other better. 

It is in such meetings that things like “deciding what parameter to use while scoring leads” should be discussed. All misunderstandings between the two departments should also be ironed out in these meetings.