How to Improve Customer Relationships and Business Value with Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing misalignment is extremely common, and companies with divided sales and marketing teams that function separately are putting themselves at a disadvantage.  Both your sales and marketing teams share objectives but achieve them in very different ways. Despite these differences in approach, ensuring that the two teams are aligned is critical to your business’ success. 

Sales and marketing alignment is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. When marketing and sales teams unite around a single revenue cycle, they dramatically improve marketing return on investment (ROI), sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line growth. According to data from Marketo, companies with strong alignment perform better, reporting 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates. 

Common Problems that Sales and Marketing Alignment Can Solve

Today’s complex B2B buying cycle introduces new challenges for marketing and sales alike. However, when sales and marketing align, many of those problems can be resolved. 

 

• • Challenge: Sales is ignoring most of the leads that marketing sends to them. According to research from Marketo and ReachForce, sales ignore up to 80% of marketing leads, instead spending half their time on unproductive prospecting. Since sales have prospects to recycle, (A Solution to Lost Leads) they’ll spend their time focused on older leads if marketing is not providing another option. If sales and marketing take the time to align on goals, lead definition, and handoff process, both teams will spend their time more effectively on promising leads. 

• • Challenge: Sales and Marketing have two different strategies. Sales and marketing alignment is vital for both organizational success and boosting morale. In order to sync up, sales and marketing teams should schedule regular meetings to keep track of shared goals and communicate freely about workflow, obstacles, and wins. Ensuring both teams have a voice when setting strategies and planning content will be the most impactful at each stage in the buying process.  

• • Challenge: Complex and redundant workflows. Sales and marketing alignment not only unifies leadership and combines shared goals and targeted Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), but it can also simplify workflows by sharing tools. Instead of marketing logging into one system and sales into another, both teams can use the same dashboards and tools, including customer engagement platforms.  

• • Challenge: A clear marketing ROI cannot be established. It can be difficult to show the true value of your marketing program without a direct response or purchase to measure. This is especially true for B2B marketers focused on lead generation programs with long, complex sales cycles. To demonstrate a clear marketing ROI, you must be able to track and measure impact in an integrated fashion across all sales and marketing systems. 

• • Challenge: Shorten sales cycle and go to market faster. The way the B2B buying process has evolved has resulted in a more complex buying cycle and a massive shift in customer relationships. Buyers are choosing to delay interactions with sales and tend to ignore traditional tactics such as outbound phone calls and emails. To meet customers where they are, sales and marketing professionals must work together to shorten the intricate new type of sales cycle. This includes synchronizing segmentation, targeting, content development, contact strategy, nurturing, engagement, closing, and customer support

Components of Sales and Marketing Alignment

In order to have a truly coordinated sales and marketing team, everything must sync up, including goals, roles, systems, and technology:

 

• • Aligning goals. Marketing projects are often long term, including setting a foundation with strong branding and generating qualified leads. Marketers look at metrics and focus on increasing brand recognition, as well as scoring and nurturing leads for the long haul. Salespeople, on the other hand, are looking to meet quotas, help solve problems for prospects, or be the personal touch that someone is looking for. They want to know what the marketing team can do for them now, so that they can make the sale today.  

• • Aligning roles. Often, sales and marketing departments view their respective roles in the revenue generation process quite differently. Sales worries about meeting quarterly goals, while marketing believes they are the only ones thinking strategically. Sales wonders why they have to generate their own leads, while marketing complains that sales ignores everything marketing generates, and so on. Coming to a common understanding of roles can help to remedy these inconsistencies. 

• • Establish shared terminology. Once you have established a regular communication cadence, make sure everyone is speaking the same language. Shared information needs to be understandable and accessible to both teams. Create a set of definitions that everyone agrees on. What constitutes a Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) must be agreed upon. Another suggestion is to create a service-level agreement (SLA). This can help eliminate confusion and solidify the roles in each department. 

• • Adopt an ABM strategy. Account-based marketing is a relatively new strategy in the B2B space. While 92% of B2B marketers have an ABM program, 64% were started within the past five years. ABM strategies join data management with marketing automation to create personal campaigns for your top B2B prospects. It breaks down barriers between marketing and sales by integrating the buyer journey from lead generation all the way through the sales funnel. Another major benefit of using ABM is its focus on engaging all the members of an account’s buying committee. And make no mistake: Personalized engagement is what customers expect. Fifty-nine percent say that tailored engagement based on past interactions is very important to winning their business. To make this happen, marketing and sales have to combine their resources and work together to develop a strategy for identifying accounts with the highest revenue value for their business and personalizing communication according to their needs and preferences. 

• • Aligning systems and technology. While ABM is a strategy, the tools and technology that you use to implement ABM programs have a big impact on your success. As more customer interactions move to the digital realm, marketing automation is on the front lines of your company’s communications. And with day-to-day business dealings taking place primarily online these days, marketing analysts anticipate B2B marketers will “actively increase their investment and more fervently adopt marketing automation technologies to facilitate better-targeted digital relationship building and digital engagement.” Marketing automation tools help you identify your audience and deliver relevant, personalized content with less lift on the marketer’s end. And they’re rapidly growing in popularity: 38% of marketers plan to increase their use of marketing automation or account-based marketing platforms over the next year. So, moving your marketing automation and CRM to the same platform is one of the most powerful steps you can take to align your sales and marketing teams, help them do their jobs more efficiently, and deliver a unified customer experience.

A single CRM and marketing automation platform allows you to:

 

• • Sync information bidirectionally, so that every update in your CRM is reflected in your marketing automation system, and vice versa   

• • Provide a comprehensive view into a prospective lead’s activity and related insights 

• • A combined approach to marketing technology helped to streamline processes and information sharing for sales and marketing teams Today’s strategy should include maintaining a single, updated view of our accounts and all the stakeholders involved in the CRM. This provides a single source of truth that everyone in the company can work from. And sales and marketing teams can access the full history of every customer interaction.  

• • Powerful account-based marketing (ABM) and marketing automation tools enable one-to-one conversations with prospects instead of just one talking to many. For maximum benefits, marketing must ensure the methodology, process, and terminology used to support these efforts is in alignment and collaboration with sales. 

Alignment is not just a business buzzword or a “nice to have.” Ensuring sales and marketing are aligned is critical to business success. But it’s not something that happens overnight or with the flip of a switch. Rather, true alignment is an ongoing process that requires commitment to continuous collaboration and improvement. With the right tools, strategies, and outlook, you will be well prepared to overcome challenges and achieve alignment success. 

About Growthline Partners

For over 10 years Growthline Partners has assisted companies design, customize and implement their technology platforms and stacks based on Zoho or Salesforce software to turn them into high performance platforms that support their revenue acceleration and customer service strategies and initiatives.

About The Author

William Pickett is the Managing Director at Growthline Partners. He is a veteran of the technology and consulting industry and has held senior technology and management positions including Group Manager at AT&T Government Solutions and Senior Manager at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young. William has extensive knowledge of Salesforce & Zoho software and experience working with the financial, manufacturing and non-profit sectors.