5 Tips To Align Your Sales Team and Marketing Team
For ambitious startups and top digital marketing agencies, the most important lesson to learn as it operates in the market is the ability to integrate and coordinate the marketing and sales processes seamlessly and sustainably.
There shouldn’t be any gaps in communication in the sales funnel as tasks are handed off from one team to another. While some ventures understand this already or quickly learn how to do so on the job, many fail and end up as a failed company or startup venture.
The efficiency and quality of the combined lead and customer management workflow controlled by the marketing department followed by a sales team determine what kind of customer relationships the company will grow.
It might seem like common sense but only 8% of companies are actually able to pull off marketing and sales alignment. In fact, 25% of companies themselves admit to misaligned or poorly aligned sales and marketing, which means losing out on 24% faster revenue growth and 27% faster profit growth in 3 years as well as 10% annual revenue loss or more.
Why Marketing And Sales Alignment Is Essential?
While coordination between any two departments in the business operations is important, it is especially so for marketing and sales. This is because both these departments play the biggest role in lead and customer relationship with the brand.
A startup with closely aligned marketing and sales departments shows 67% better efficacy in closing deals and 58% better customer retention, as shown by LinkedIn research. This ultimately leads to 208% higher revenue. An Aberdeen Group study also reveals that such companies exhibit 32% faster growth on average.
These stats are proof enough that aligning marketing and sales has veritable advantages whether you are the next promising startup or the best digital marketing agency in the industry.
How To Align Your Sales Process With Your Inbound Marketing Efforts?
One thing should be mentioned right in the beginning – when using the term “marketing” here, we mean inbound marketing. As all top digital marketing agencies, we also believe that every customer wants solid evidence that your brand can add value to their lives in some way before thinking about buying from you in the case of B2C transactions, or doing business with you in the case of B2B relationships.
Every customer wants the product or service of the company tailored to their needs and catering to them individually instead of offering cookie-cutter solutions. In keeping with that, here are five approaches to accomplishing sales and marketing alignment that are absolutely mandatory for any business, startup, or otherwise.
#1. Create Buyer Personas And Define Leads Together
The biggest problem when it comes to misaligned sales and marketing teams is that, for them, the vision of the ideal buyer persona or the definition of a lead is different. Therefore, they end up targeting different metrics and goals entirely. Apparently, only one in two companies enforces a formal definition for a lead among the two departments.
As a result, neither does the marketing department have any idea which buyer is suitable to move along the sales funnel nor does the sales department understand the right way to smoothly continue the buyer’s journey after they exit the marketing panel.
Not having defined criteria for marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads means that a customer has a jarring transition as they shift from interacting with the marketers to interacting with sales reps. Salespeople too agree that only 7% of them receive leads from their marketing departments that they can classify as high-quality.
#2. Plan Lead Nurturing Campaigns Throughout The Customer Journey
In a customer-centric market, lead nurturing is the number one method to ensure that the consumer grows a sentiment of loyalty towards the brand. A monodirectional customer journey is now a thing of the past. Customers may oscillate between the sales team and the marketing as they deem fit. Active engagement with the customer throughout their buying journey is essential for this.
A scary number to consider is that a whopping 79% of marketing-qualified leads fail to result in a successful sale because of the lack of lead nurturing. High-quality content is one of the most effective ways to nurture your leads.
Now, even though 95% of buyers gravitate towards companies that provide useful content throughout their journey, 65% of salespeople seem to lack the same to provide. Thus, coordination between the two departments will help bridge this gap in the customer’s journey.
#3. Implement SLAs For Smooth Operations
SLAs or service level agreements help to provide a definite framework in which the sales and marketing departments can work together. You might come up with a brilliant strategy to align sales with inbound marketing, but unless the rules are made binding in some way, employees will tend not to take them seriously.
SLAs will help define clearly what marketers will provide to the sales rep and what the salespeople will expect from them. By aligning business goals, metrics, and definitions, it becomes easier to reach the set targets as well as uphold accountability.
Yet, only 26% of businesses, startups, and other organisations have an SLA in place.
#4. Drive Transparency Between The Two Departments
Black box operations may be efficient and even necessary at times but most of the time, transparency wins. Business rules and computer interfaces that allow marketers and salespeople to interact freely can yield way better results than a siloed existence of the two in the company.
To 43% of people, the lack of free and accurate data exchange between the two departments was the largest hurdle in bringing about the alignment of sales and marketing, a number which had gone up in the two years prior.
Constant collaboration and honest reporting allow the two teams to get a clear view of where they stand and where they need to be. It grows sales and marketing solidarity instead of polarizing them as before.
#5. Hire One Of The Top Digital Marketing Agencies To Help
For a startup, it can be difficult to align its sales and marketing departments while they are still struggling to grow and stabilize. But, that does not mean smaller businesses are doomed to fail. A much more cost-effective, hassle-free, and easy solution for them would be to hire the best digital marketing agency they can find to hold their hands and assist them through the process.
These agencies have the resources to get the job done without having to take the business through trial and error. Moreover, the startup gets to focus on growing their business, expanding production, and earning revenue instead of worrying about how to fix their customer relationship management process.
To Conclude,
Although sales and marketing alignment has always been a big deal, it is coming to the forefront now. This has begun a race among all the top digital marketing agencies to strive to serve only the best of marketing services for their clients. However, we are more concerned with how we can help you reach your full potential. Our goal is to help you pursue your purpose and reach your targets in a way that ensures long-term success even when you have grown to a self-sufficient company.