Sales and Marketing Alignment – The Secret to More Revenue

Overview

This article will explain what Sales and Marketing alignment is, explain the benefits of Sales and Marketing alignment, and provide best practices to help more fully align your Sales and Marketing departments.

What Is Sales and Marketing Alignment?

Sales and Marketing alignment is the process of having the two departments as fully integrated as possible. Alignment helps them to know and understand what they have in common, what the differences are and what they need to provide to the other department to ensure a productive relationship. Indicators of strong Sales and Marketing alignment include:

• Having regular, ongoing communications and meetings
• Understanding the roles and responsibilities of the other department
• Knowing and understanding the other department’s goals and objectives
• Providing regular feedback and input to each other
• Defining and agreeing to definitions (such as MQLs, SALs, SQLs)
• Creating and agreeing to SLAs
• Participation/representation in each other’s staff meetings
• Sharing account planning activities
• Sharing participation in customer meetings and visits

Why Do I Need Sales and Marketing Alignment?

Everyone knows the Sales and Marketing departments fulfill fundamentally different roles within a business. Sales is responsible for selling the company’s products and services, while Marketing produces the content and materials that trains Sales, educates the customer and helps enable the sale. Both are customer-facing functions (Sales typically more directly than Marketing) and both are essential to the success of the business.

However, due to the silos that exist within most businesses, Sales and Marketing departments, instead of being tightly aligned and engaged, are often far apart and do not communicate or interact on a regular basis. This can lead to inefficiencies in both departments, which in turn can translate into lost opportunities and lost revenue.

In reality though, Sales and Marketing are actually two sides of the same coin. In many companies, both departments roll up to the same senior executive, who has a vested interest in ensuring both departments perform to the best of their abilities. Both departments have responsibility for driving sales. Both have goals to increase the size of the customer base. Both interact with customers. All of which ultimately helps generate increased revenue for the company. The main difference between the two departments is in how they accomplish their respective tasks.

Breaking through the silos helps both departments become more productive and efficient, which in turns helps the business. In fact, a recent report by the Aberdeen Group¹ indicates that businesses that have adopted Sales and Marketing alignment best practices see significant increases in attainment of sales quotas (38%) and YoY corporate revenue (13.1%) over those that do not.

That is why your Sales and Marketing departments need to be in alignment.

Steps to Alignment

While Sales and Marketing alignment may seem difficult to accomplish, and is often time consuming at first, there really is no secret. It is basically a matter of reaching across the table and establishing communications between the two departments. Once communication is established, engagement, interaction and understanding will follow.

The following list of best practices (by category) provides simple guidelines to begin the alignment process, or help ensure that any alignment you currently have continues to strengthen and grow. Depending on your situation, these guidelines can be used individually or combined into a larger, more structured process.

COMMUNICATION BEST PRACTICES 

• Allow Marketing to take part in regularly occurring Sales meetings when and where possible. This provides Marketing with insight as to what is important to the Sales department, allows them to learn how Sales deals with customers, and better understand what Sales needs from Marketing.
• Allow Sales to take part in regularly occurring Marketing meetings when and where possible. This provides Sales with insight into the type of information that Marketing needs from them, helps break down barriers between the two organizations, and helps correct and remove any misconceptions.
• Define and develop procedures between the two departments to provide input and feedback

CUSTOMER INSIGHT BEST PRACTICES 

• Allow Marketing to attend in-house customer briefings with the Sales team. This provides Marketing with more insight into how the customer views the company and shows Marketing how Sales uses the materials that they develop
• When and where possible, allow Marketing to accompany Sales on customer calls or visits
• Have Sales and Marketing define and develop an “ideal” or target customer profile together

GOALS, OBJECTIVES, METRICS, PROCESSES BEST PRACTICES 

• Ensure that Marketing understands the Sales goals and objectives
• Clearly determine how the Marketing activities will support and align with the Sales goals and objectives
• Define and develop KPIs and metrics in support of goals and objectives
• Ensure both departments understand and agree with the metrics to be used
• Determine any common goals and objectives
• Define and agree upon common definitions used between departments (such as MQL, SAL, SQL)
• Define and agree to the lead hand-off process
• Establish agreed-upon SLAs
• Define and develop reporting processes

MARKETING ACTIVITIES AND CAMPAIGN PLANNING PRACTICES 

• Allow and/or assign Sales people to get involved (as possible) with Marketing activities and campaigns
• Allow and/or assign different Sales people to get involved (as possible) with Marketing activities and campaigns
• Involve Sales from the beginning in the planning process for any Marketing activity or campaign
• Ask Sales to attend the regularly occurring Marketing meetings to hear and learn about Marketing activities and campaigns
• Build in a feedback loop with Sales during the Marketing development process
• Ask Sales to provide feedback and inputs throughout the development of the Marketing activity to help ensure that what is being developed is on track and hits the mark (avoids the “marketing development in a vacuum” problem)
• Involve Sales in metrics and data review (as possible) during and after the Marketing activity or campaign
• Continue these Sales and Marketing alignment activities even after the launch

SALES ACCOUNT PLANNING AND ACTIVITIES BEST PRACTICES

• Allow and/or assign Marketing personnel to get involved (as possible) with Sales account planning and related activities
• Allow and/or assign different Marketing personnel to get involved (as possible) with Sales account planning and related activities

Sales and Marketing Alignment Benefits

As Sales and Marketing alignment increases, numerous benefits will begin to accrue, including:

• Eliminates Sales and Marketing working in isolation
• Improved and/or increased communication between departments
• More accurate reporting by both departments
• Improved quality of leads
• Enhanced productivity due to better and/or shared use of technology between departments
• Marketing materials become more tightly aligned to the needs and requirements of Sales
• Enhanced customer experience due to more targeted Sales and Marketing materials

Sales + Marketing = More Sales = More Revenue

 

While Sales and Marketing alignment may initially be time consuming to implement, in the long run it truly is the secret to more revenue.

© 2015, 2020 Richard Hatheway, Catalyst Strategic Marketing

All rights reserved

1 – The Aberdeen Group, Research Brief, Sales and Marketing Alignment: A Primer on Successful Collaboration, March 2014 (http://v1.aberdeen.com/launch/report/research_briefs/8803-RB-Sales-Marketing-Alignment-Collaboration.asp)

It’s Sales AND Marketing, NOT Sales OR Marketing

OVERVIEW

Sales and Marketing departments are critical, integral functions to businesses. As such, they need to work together to ensure that the desired outcome for both functions - sales - occurs. Unfortunately, that often does not happen.

SALES AND MARKETING – TOGETHER AGAIN (OR ARE THEY?)

Sales and Marketing functions have been around as long as there have been businesses, so you would think these organizations would have learned long ago how to co-exist and cooperate. After all, they both want the same thing, for the business to succeed and grow, right?

While it would appear to be so, the reality is often somewhat different.

Although both functions are tasked with engaging prospective customers in the hopes of converting them into actual paying customers and generating new revenue as an outcome, that’s where the similarities end.

That’s also where the competition begins.

COMPETITION IN THE TRENCHES

Competition?

Yes. Sadly, many Sales and Marketing departments see themselves as competitors, instead of viewing themselves as business partners. Instead of organizations that are aligned in pursuit of a common goal, they prefer to create more barriers between them.

Due to this, competition between Sales and Marketing departments often takes pettiness to new levels of idiocy. Questions such as “Can a Marketing person contact a customer without a Sales person on the phone?” or “Should Sales develop their own customer-facing materials without Marketing’s assistance?” take on the characteristics of a turf war, with both departments not willing to back down, compromise or give an inch. Things that should not be an issue are suddenly blown out of proportion and end up impacting the effectiveness of both organizations. Petty jealousies may also rear their ugly heads, such as when the Sales Department received new laptops or cell phones, while the Marketing Department does not.

Other issues, such as which department gets additional headcount, resources or budget also tend to divide the two organizations, as each believes the other to be the recipient of something they are not. While there may be a justifiable business reason for these actions, the end result is often a larger chasm developing between Sales and Marketing, which in turn continues to negatively affect the performance of both organizations.

Instead of these two business-critical functions working together to create better, more efficient ways for them to accomplish their goals and objectives, and oh yeah, by extension, growing the business, they devote their energies to becoming less in sync, less aligned and less productive.

THE IRONIC TRUTH

But the truth is that both Sales and Marketing actually cannot really exist without the other.

What!?!

It’s true. Without the Marketing department, Sales faces an uphill battle to sell, as their product or service may not be well known, the value it provides to a customer is unclear, customers don’t know where to find information, or the company selling it may not even be known. And without the Sales department, Marketing is effectively creating and developing messaging, value props, campaigns, content, and lots of other types of information for no reason (unless they’re going to go out and sell the product themselves, which is highly unlikely).

Ironic, isn’t it?

Both functions may think that they’re indispensable to the business, and they are to some degree. However, the reality is that Sales and Marketing are complementary skills that really only work well when they are used together.

In other words, when they’re aligned with each other.

BRIDGING THE GAP

So what can be done to bridge the gap? How do we close the divide between Sales and Marketing? How can we make it easier for the two departments to work together?

It’s simple, really.

All it takes is a commitment by both the Sales and the Marketing leadership that instead of fighting, their organizations will communicate and cooperate. Agree that they’ll work together instead of competing. Decide that they’ll set aside petty politics and focus on achieving the business goals together. Determine that they’ll help their teams understand that Sales and Marketing really are two sides of the same coin.

In other words, top down leadership.

That’s it.

Top down leadership in this instance means having leaders in both the Sales and the Marketing organizations set the standards of cooperation and communication for their teams. But in order for these to be effective, they must not only model these behaviors, they must practice what they preach.

This can be accomplished by such actions as having the Sales and Marketing leaders issuing a weekly email update to both teams with news and updates on customer wins, how current revenue is tracking to the quarterly goal, how the Marketing tools contributed to Sales success, or other relevant information. Or schedule a regular weekly call or meeting where a representative from each organization can provide updates on activities, problems, cares and concerns. Or have a representative from Sales participate in the weekly Marketing staff meeting, and vice-versa.

The possibilities for improving engagement and alignment between Sales and Marketing are endless, the investment is small, yet the payoff can be significant. And by doing so, the two functions will begin to see and understand that they’re not so different after all and that they really do work better together than apart.

And then it really does become Sales AND Marketing…

© 2019 – Richard Hatheway, Catalyst Strategic Marketing

All rights reserved.