A disconnection between marketing and sales can create a confusing, disjointed journey for new leads, ultimately reducing their likelihood of becoming buyers. That’s because the sales experience won’t match the marketing message.
This common misalignment is a formidable challenge that leads to missed opportunities and customer frustration. But aligning marketing and sales creates a cohesive customer journey where you can leverage collective insights about the customer experience.
Dive into this exploration of the advantages awaiting those who bridge the marketing-sales divide as we give you the keys to unlocking enhanced customer engagement, increased revenue, and sustained business growth.
What Is Sales-Marketing Alignment?
The concept of sales-marketing alignment emphasizes the need for close coordination and communication between these traditionally separate departments. Working in tandem enhances efficiency and optimizes processes that improve the customer experience. Ideally, this partnership lifts both teams’ Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), such as lead generation, win rates, and customer value.
Research clarifies why getting the teams on the same page is essential. B2B companies with strong sales and marketing alignment see their three-year revenue grow 24% faster and have a 36% higher customer retention rate. Highly aligned teams drive 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts. When your sales and marketing team work well together, they’re 67% more likely to close deals.
But how do you align marketing and sales teams to streamline your operations and improve your revenue? Here are some ideas.
10 Ways To Align Marketing and Sales
- Share KPIs: Establishing shared KPIs aligns marketing and sales teams towards a common objective and fosters collaborative efforts and a unified purpose.
- Collaborate Regularly: Through consistent information exchange – including intent data, campaign reporting, and customer feedback – sales and marketing teams can gain valuable insights into each other’s activities. That promotes a symbiotic relationship and more informed decision-making.
- Share Data: Leveraging marketing automation tools to transfer important lead activity data with sales via integration ensures the teams collaborate more effectively. Getting the full context of a lead’s journey allows for optimized processes and communication during the handoff from marketing to sales, improving the buying experience.
- Agree on Lead Definitions: Clearly defining and agreeing upon criteria for marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs) provides a shared understanding of who to contact and when – reducing friction between the two departments.
- Use Customer Feedback: Prioritizing customer feedback as a valuable resource refines sales and marketing strategies and ensures alignment with customer expectations and needs for every buying process step.
- Stay Consistent: Maintaining a consistent brand and open communication with each campaign ensures a clear and unified approach when briefing sales about new marketing campaigns and initiatives.
- Create BOFU Marketing Assets: Develop a robust content strategy that includes bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content. This will provide sales teams valuable tools to close deals and reinforce the alignment between marketing and sales objectives.
- Consistent Training: Conduct training sessions or “office hours” to facilitate a mutual understanding of roles, challenges, and processes between marketing and sales team members and build a shared knowledge base.
- Determine Processes: Establishing a repeatable model for cross-functional collaboration ensures that marketing and sales teams follow a standardized process. That minimizes the risk of duplicated efforts and overlooked tasks.
- Celebrate Wins: Boost team morale by celebrating joint successes, sharing insights from triumphs, and reinforcing a positive culture of collaboration that encourages continuous improvement.
Best Practices To Align Marketing and Sales
- Coordinate Content Marketing With Sales: Create compelling content that resonates with the sales team’s needs. This will help them use the content effectively in their interactions with potential customers and reinforce a unified messaging strategy for the entire customer journey.
- Determine a Regular Meeting Cadence: Establishing a regular meeting schedule between sales and marketing teams fosters ongoing communication. It facilitates the exchange of ideas and allows for real-time feedback. This guarantees that both teams remain informed about each other’s priorities and can swiftly adapt strategies to evolving market dynamics.
- Use Integration Tools: Employ integration tools that bridge the gap between sales and marketing platforms to enhance collaboration. By providing seamless data flow, teams can access shared information effortlessly, creating a more cohesive approach to customer engagement across the entire sales funnel.
- Share Analytics and Reports: Facilitate data-driven decision-making by sharing analytics and reports between the teams. Both sides will gain valuable insights into performance metrics, customer behavior, and campaign effectiveness. It’s an effective way to foster a culture of transparency and continuous improvement.
Careful alignment between sales and marketing is a significant driver of business growth. Businesses see a 27% faster profit growth when both teams work in coordination. Highly-aligned organizations can see as much as a 32% year-over-year revenue growth. It’s clear that sales and marketing alignment is valuable for your business. But you need to choose the right solution to help you.
Boomi’s intelligent integration and automation platform can be a powerful enabler in aligning sales and marketing efforts. Connect the disparate data sources and systems of the sales and marketing teams to achieve a unified view of customer information. Integration with Boomi eliminates data silos by providing both departments with a holistic understanding of the customer journey. This cohesion helps marketing teams generate more targeted and informed campaigns, and sales teams benefit from access to real-time, accurate customer data.
In addition, Boomi’s automation features optimize processes across sales and marketing functions. Automated workflows ensure the smooth transition of leads from marketing to sales, reducing manual handoffs and delays. This accelerates the sales cycle and enhances the overall efficiency of the organization. Boomi is a unifying force that breaks down operational barriers, enhancing the collective impact of sales and marketing efforts.
Learn how Boomi can help your organization with sales and marketing alignment.