Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices to Increase Your Revenue

The most successful companies consistently implement sales and marketing alignment best practices. When you align your sales and marketing teams so they’re working in lockstep, you’ll win more sales, generate more revenue, and see your business grow faster. In fact, 87 percent of sales and marketing leaders say that the alignment between sales and marketing enables business growth.

Despite this, 90 percent of sales and marketing professionals believe that there is a misalignment between sales and marketing efforts across strategy, content, and processes, which negatively impacts the customer experience.

Ultimately, this disconnect highlights the need for organizations to implement sales and marketing alignment best practices to increase the odds for continued success.

Considering the above, the question is: Where do you start? Fortunately, we’re here to help, and in this post, we’ll look at some of the sales and marketing alignment best practices you can implement in your business.

Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices

Your business will perform better when you align your sales and marketing teams. In fact, 85 percent of sales and marketing leaders believe that sales and marketing alignment to be the most significant opportunity to improve business performance.

With that in mind, you’ll need to align your sales and marketing teams in the areas of:

•  Messaging

•  Content strategy

•  Handoff process

•  Regular communications

Keep in mind, though, these are just a small sample of areas where sales and marketing efforts could be aligned, and there are many others that you could consider based on your specific circumstances.

We’ll now look at some of these in more detail.

Understand Your Customers

Traditionally, sales teams had complete autonomy over customers buying processes, but with advances in technology, marketing now has an increasingly integral role to play. This is especially important when it comes to understanding who your customers are.

A key sales and marketing alignment best practice is to allow your marketers to provide sales with deeper insights into your customers’ wants and expectations. As a result, the buyer personas that marketing teams develop can help sales teams better understand their audience, their pain points and challenges, and how your products can help them solve these challenges.

Coordinate Your Messaging

It’s a marketer’s job to constantly generate brand awareness, drive traffic to your website and app, and connect with the buyer throughout their journey to move them through the funnel more predictably. They’ll typically do this by using various messaging, offers and promotions that all aim to generate more leads for your sales team and, by implication, your business.

It is, however, vital that your marketing team shares these campaigns with your sales team. In this way, your sales team will know what offers their leads look at when they contact. This allows them to serve your customers better, which, in turn, improves the customer experience.

Align Your Content

Nowadays, content is a critical component of every business’s overall marketing strategy. Typically, marketers create content based on the needs and expectations of their buyer persona.

Now, what would happen if you align your sales and marketing teams regarding the content your marketing team creates. Your sales team speaks to prospective customers all the time, so they have deeper insights into what your customers like about your business or products.

They can offer real-world analytics to supplement the theoretical buyer persona that your marketing team has created. When you align your teams, your marketing efforts will be more effective and will win more leads for your business.

Related: How Customer Data Analytics and Automation Can Boost Your Company’s Performance

Share Data and Analytics

One of the most important sales and marketing alignment best practices is to share data between your sales and marketing teams. When you do, you’ll eliminate data silos, and both teams will be able to get a complete view of the customer.

In this way, you create a culture of collaboration, where sales and marketing work together to identify the best opportunities and drive faster time to revenue through effective, targeted marketing campaigns and profitable sales.

In addition, when your sales and marketing teams work off of the same shared data, they’ll be able to go deeper into both processes and the interplay between them. Simply put, they’ll be able to see what works and what doesn’t and implement the necessary strategies to improve.

Set Shared Goals

Typically, your sales and marketing teams will focus on entirely different key performance indicators to set their goals and track their progress against these goals. As part of your sales and marketing alignment strategy, you should also prioritize shared goals that both your teams can track and work toward.

Of course, every company strives to increase revenue. This shared goal requires sales and marketing to move beyond attribution and understand revenue impact instead. By being able to connect efforts to revenue, it’s a better measure of what is actually working and what isn’t. 

Meet Regularly

One of the sales and marketing alignment best practices is to eliminate communication silos and get your teams to meet regularly. If they do, they can share resources and insights into each other’s processes.

For example, your marketing team can learn how to support your sales team while your sales team is likely to learn more about the customers they’re selling to. Ultimately, this makes both teams more effective.

Integrate Your Tools

Just like sales and marketing teams focus on different goals and track different KPIs, they also use different tools, like CRMs and MAPs. However, technology allows you to integrate these systems seamlessly. In turn, you’ll enable the data flow from your sales team to your marketing team and vice versa.

In this way, you’ll have access to more reliable data and deeper analytics – leading to greater insights to improve your processes. It doesn’t stop there, though. By integrating these systems, your teams always have access to the data they need and when they need it, making them more efficient and productive and allowing you to generate more revenue.

Related: 7 Benefits of Salesforce and Marketo Integration (and How to Do It)

Promote Your Sales Team

A good marketing team can effectively outline product virtues and how it can solve customers’ challenges. So, why not use your marketing team to promote your sales teams’ expertise. If they do, your sales team will likely win more sales and generate more revenue for your business.

Develop the Right Handoff Process

When it comes to sales and marketing alignment, the handoff between the two teams is often a challenge. Fortunately, you can eliminate this challenge by creating a handoff process that determines exactly what the handoff entails, when it happens, and which team members are responsible for what.

Use Sales Calls Effectively

It’s not exactly in a marketer’s job description to listen to sales calls. After all, they need to focus on marketing your products and generating leads for your sales team.

However, there is value in marketers listening to sales calls to better understand your customers, their pain points, what they like about your company or products, and how they aim to use them.

In turn, your marketing team can then use this data to shape their marketing strategies based on the needs and expectations of your customers.

The Benefits of Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Teams

By this time, you probably already know how sales and marketing alignment can help your business. To sum up, when you align your sales and marketing teams, you’ll

•  Understand your customers better, which allows you to get more leads, improve your conversions, and make more sales.

•  Improve your sales and marketing strategies, which increases their impact on your bottom line.

•  Improve the customer journey by knowing exactly what the customer wants and needs and giving them the right solution to their problems.

Choosing the Right Platform for Sales and Marketing Alignment

It’s vital to align your sales and marketing team to ensure maximum profitability and growth. When you plan, consider Vertify. Our platform allows you to integrate your sales and marketing teams’ tools for seamless alignment, robust analytics and prescriptive next steps. Marketers can spend more time executing and less time gathering and analyzing data.

To learn more about Vertify and how it can help you, request a demo today.