Sales and marketing are among the essential departments of any organization. Ensuring harmony and alignment between these two departments is crucial, especially for businesses with extensive sales and marketing teams. However, it is possible to align these two departments if you use the right strategies. 

In today’s articles, we will share the tested tips that you can use to align your sales and marketing teams. We shall explain each tip to make it easy for any business owner or digital marketer to implement in their business. But before we get into the tips, let me first explain what sales and marketing alignment means. 

What does sales and marketing alignment mean? 

It refers to all the steps your marketing and sales teams take to ensure they stay in harmony at all times. It is a no-brainer that having these two departments working hand in hand will lead to more and better-quality leads, eventually leading to more revenue. Without proper alignment between sales and marketing, customer experience will be affected, ultimately reducing revenue if the problem is not addressed. 

Now that we know what sales and marketing alignment is let’s get into the tips. 

The best sales and marketing alignment tips

• Have a standard content creation process 

Your sales team is always in contact with prospects and customers, so they know their needs better than anyone else in the organization. The challenge is that these folks are always busy attending to customers and trying to explain to them the product to close more deals. But on the other hand, the feedback they get from customers during the sales process is very important for marketing.

To ensure harmony between the feedback your sales team gets from customers and the content created by your marketing team, have a standard procedure for creating content that involves both teams. You can use software like Google sheets or standard marketing automation apps where your sales team can input all the feedback they get from customers. 

Then the marketing team can always get ideas from this feedback and find ways of integrating it into the marketing content. For example, if the customers have certain features they do not understand, the marketing team can create an explainer article that explicitly discusses these features and how best users can take advantage of them. 

• Have regular meetings 

Communicating through software alone is not enough to create the alignment these two departments need. There needs to be an arrangement where sales and marketing teams can always meet to share information about the events in their respective departments. Depending on how you run your company, these meetings can be virtual or in-person. 

If all members of both teams are physically available at the workplace, you should encourage them to spend lunch hours and any other free time within the work hours together. This improves the bond between the teams that will eventually promote openness amongst the members. 

• Setting shared goals 

In most organizations, sales and marketing departments usually have different goals. Usually, sales teams focus on revenue growth, whereas marketing focuses on getting more traffic to the website or the physical stores of the business if they have one. But what if these two departments have goals that cut across to encourage collaboration in achieving such goals. 

Yes, you can still maintain the KPIs for each department, but at least create one or two goals that both teams can work towards together. For instance, you can set a goal like increasing the conversion rate as a KPI for both teams. The marketing team will have to generate better quality leads, whereas the sales team will have to use the best strategies while communicating with those leads to turn them into paying customers. 

Such goals will create more harmony between sales and marketing. And at the end of the day, both departments, including the business as a whole will win because such a goal usually leads to more revenue. 

• The sales team should be informed of the new marketing content

Marketing team members regularly create and publish content and offers to generate more leads. To ensure alignment between the two teams, the marketing team needs to always inform those on the side of sales about the new sales offers and articles or social media posts published. This will help the team members on the sales side to prepare the correct answers when customers start asking questions about the published content. 

• Sales and marketing should share reporting and analytics

We are lucky to be living in an era where getting feedback about our marketing and sales efforts is just a few clicks away. With CRM and marketing automation tools, it is possible to get analytics about the sales or marketing operations to get an idea of how well customers responded to the marketing campaigns and sales strategies.

For instance, analytics on the sales side could include the ratio of leads that turned into paying customers (leads conversion rate). This kind of information can be of great use to the team members on the marketing side. If there is a drop in the conversion rate, the marketing team may have to develop solutions that will help improve the quality of leads sent over to the sales team. 

Bottom line

Having well-aligned marketing and sales teams is very crucial for any business that intends to build a long-term revenue generation strategy. If you effectively implement the five tips we have just shared, you will undoubtedly be guaranteed to get positive results sooner or later. So, take time to see which strategies you should prioritize as you kick start the alignment process of your sales and marketing teams.