According to a study by MathMarketing and Marketo, aligning your marketing and sales can improve your business drastically. In numbers this means your business can:
- Get 67% better at closing sales;
- Enjoy 108% better lead acceptance; and
- Generate 209% more from Marketing.
Sales and marketing alignment is great for your business. But in order to be able to practice it successfully, you need to understand what this alignment demands. In this blog, we’ll help you understand exactly what you’re meant to align within your business to achieve best results.
1. Goals
First and foremost, it is critical that both, sales and marketing teams work towards one goal. Typically, businesses have sales work towards their sales and growth objectives, while marketing’s goal is the number of qualified leads generated, whether they are sales-qualified or marketing qualified. In any case, the objectives for your marketing and sales teams are rarely the same figure.
Misaligned goals consequently lead to teams working towards different results, and ultimately, not working together. Even worse, it suggests that marketing’s role in progressing a lead stops as soon as it has been passed on to sales. This is not (or shouldn’t be) the case. Both marketing and sales departments should be held accountable for the complete buying process, and therefore both teams should have the same objectives.
After setting the high-level objective of sales and growth, the team can then work out quarterly sales aims, the number of leads that need to go to sales as well as the number of leads that need to be generated. Essentially, they will have specific goals set for each stage of the buying journey, and they will work on achieving these goals together.
What would help even more is, if both teams had access to a system that showed the progress of achieving these goals, perhaps through a marketing automation system or a CRM. This would give the teams an understanding of what has been working and what needs to be improved. Visibility of progress by both marketing and sales will foster a better working relationship to achieve the teams’ common goals.
2. Planning
According to MathMarketing and Marketo's study, planning should be done swiftly and jointly. It is found that businesses that complete their planning process within four weeks enjoy 209% more contribution to revenue from marketing, and 13% less churn than those who take over four months to plan.
Of course, alignment means that sales and marketing teams need to be involved in the planning process, along with finance, operations and production. Not only will you get relevant input from each of these departments, but having them all involved in the planning process, will get them to agree on a single plan for your business. And the value of having these key business units in agreement is unmatched.
With these departments involved in the planning process, you will gain greater understanding of objectives from sales, customer churn from finance, systems and processes from operations, tactic and execution from marketing and finally, capacity and prices from production. At the end of the process, they will have set clear goals, and more importantly, have a clear understanding of the roles they play in order to realise these objectives.
3. Funnel Accountability
More often than not, businesses have marketing take care of the top of the funnel, while sales takes care of the bottom of the funnel. The problem with this is, who takes care of the middle of the funnel? Who takes care of those leads who are interested in moving further, but are not ready to buy, yet? No one. As a result, leads are neglected, and therefore leak. Even the best lead generation tactics fail without the appropriate middle of funnel tactic.
It is vital that marketing and sales look at the buyer’s journey as a whole, and within each stage, understand the role they’re meant to play. Yes, marketing plays a bigger role in the initial stages, and sales plays the key role in the bottom of the funnel, but in the middle, they must work together to determine the best way to progress the buyer. For instance, after they have given their details to your business to download a specific material, they might still not be ready to buy and will need some more time and information. The information you want to provide them with in this case is a combination of the issue they’re interested in as well as why your business can provide them with a better solution than your competitors. You can provide this information by entering them into a nurture campaign or sending them customised information directly.
Within their study, Marketo and MathMarketing affirm that naming the stages based on buyer language will improve your results as it forces both marketing and sales to look at the sales process from the buyer’s perspective. Essentially, cutting out sales jargon and using buyer language will help both marketing and sales to communicate in a way that the buyer understands, and this will help contribute to the buyer progression.
The key to alignment is to not make your marketing and sales teams sit in a room and get along, but rather for them to become one team, with aligned goals, joint planning and collaborative marketing execution based on the buyer’s journey.
To learn more about buyer-centric marketing, download the white paper below. Or, to read more about alignment, refer to our blog article on building effective sales and marketing alignment.
