Around 60% -70% of B2B marketing content is never used, and close to 75% of promotional leads never translate into a sale; neglecting to link sales and marketing teams wastes money and resources. If this sounds similar, it’s time to address the issue of sales and marketing alignment. Because if you don’t, your company won’t be able to expand any further.
Many business-to-business marketing and sales teams struggle in today’s consumer environment. By the minute, prospects emerge from the shadows to participate in a conversation. When sales and marketing are integrated rather than separated, it’s far easier to track outcomes and make high-impact modifications to grow your customer base. It’s the distinction between becoming a good leader and a “World Class” leader!
Marketing and sales alignment aims to achieve one unified goal: quarterly profit, which is over or delivered. While tensions will always exist, having a culture of effective communication and realistic expectations can be good and productive.
Here are seven smart tips for aligning sales and marketing.
1. Create a Single Customer Journey
Restructuring the entire customer journey is a great way to get everyone together in your sales and marketing teams. It would help to concentrate on a specific brand user experience rather than several siloed customer experiences.
All need to be unified as one seamless experience – from the knowledge phase at the start of the buyer’s journey funnel to the corporate loyalty stage. This allows your team to keep track of a prospect.
However, obtaining a holistic perspective of the prospect is the most difficult task for businesses to create a single-user experience. Such circumstances necessitate the employment of technology. Digital marketing agencies with a well-aligned sales and marketing staff use the most powerful technology and B2B marketing strategies.
2. Create an SLA
If you’re unfamiliar with an SLA, it’s essentially a written agreement or contract between marketing and sales. This contract explains each department’s responsibilities and must be signed when marketing and sales meet for the first time.
Follow-up frequency, follow-up time, and follow-up percentage of prospects can all be included in the sales. Revenue, and changes made, indicate that early production and B2B lead generation are all examples of marketing goals. Although this may be unnecessary, it is critical for sales and marketing alignment.
Furthermore, research on marketing and sales alignment has revealed that companies with an active SLA encounter enjoy a 30% growth in the ROI per year as opposed to those without an SLA.
3. Use the “Marketing First” Approach
When your sales and marketing departments are out of sync, everyone sings to their tune: marketing will build a campaign for one group of customers, while the sales department will make cold calls or email a separate group of clients (assuming they have a genuine interest). There are a variety of B2B digital marketing and communication channels available to assist your sales crew if they are continuously on the move.
This collaborative strategy can help B2B companies achieve remarkable results. The sales team can then step in to reaffirm what the marketing team has said and complete the deal after the lead is sufficiently informed and prepared to decide.
4. Track Joint KPIs
The fact that the sales and marketing teams are evaluated differently is one of the most difficult aspects of aligning them. When aligning your marketing and sales departments, one aspect to consider is measuring shared key performance indicators (KPIs). Your team will become more cohesive as a result of this.
If your sales and marketing teams share KPIs, you’ll be able to observe the synergy between their efforts and assess how your company is performing in both sales and marketing.
5. Create Marketing Assets to Close the Sale
Regrettably, two out of every three sales professionals are unsure of what content to offer prospects, which means that the material you develop will most likely go to waste. The major difference between linked sales and marketing teams and misaligned teams, unsurprisingly, is that sales teams in high alignment organizations understand precisely how they should use the information.
Content is used more strategically when marketing and sales teams are connected, rather than being provided haphazardly and without rationale.
6. Ensure That the Marketing Message is Consistent
Consistent messaging is an important advantage of a well-aligned sales and marketing team.
Your B2B marketing services and communications may now warm up prospects in preparation for the sales team, who will repeat those very same campaigns, using them to close the deal, thanks to the alignment of both teams. If the advertising messages are well-received, the sales team can take action to clinch more business. As a result, it’s critical to ensure that your messaging is consistent and relevant throughout the client experience.
7. Invest in Tools that Support Alignment
Investing in integrated solutions is the simplest approach to synchronizing sales and marketing. When using integrated technology, workflows and information no longer have to be stored in separate silos. This improves communication and allows both teams to learn more about one another’s best practices, common difficulties, and everyday operations.
When building your technological stack, examine your CRM, B2B connection database, content management, prospecting tools, and other applications your team employs. Make sure that both departments have access to these tools and that they can communicate with one another.
Final Word
Your main priority as a B2B company will be to have your sales and marketing teams collaborate. When both of your teams are on the same page, you’ll be able to uncover new facts about the sales process, change and improve your marketing and sales methods, create new business prospects and increase income. You can even unveil such a strategy with a b2b digital marketing agency in India
You’ll be able to discover valuable insights into the selling process, fine-tune and optimize your marketing and sales strategies, develop new business opportunities and raise revenues by combining sales and marketing into a single department.
