5 Ways to Foster Sales & Marketing Alignment + Key Benefits

Encourage your team members to view a situation from their colleague’s perspective and take an empathetic view. One of the biggest misconceptions between sales and marketing can be the assumption that the other is doing something for their own benefit. We’ve all probably got access to Slack, Dropbox, or similar services for sharing information. If people are invested in the marketing activites, they are more likely to get behind them and help make them successful. Post-event or campaign wrap-ups are important for maintaining momentum and ensuring that both teams are continuing to have touch points with their client base. Provide the sales team with social posts that they can push out across their personal platforms.

Although each department will have its own goals to reach, such as brand awareness and lead generation for marketing and conversions and ROI for sales, the two can aim for the same overarching goals. Sales and marketing professionals should be on the same page when it comes to the kinds of goals they want to achieve. Both teams should connect the sales funnel at every stage, with marketing connecting with customers at most stages of the sales funnel while sales brings it home during the last phases of the customer journey. Having both teams working cohesively can keep them on the right track as they move more customers toward a sale and long-term retention. Although marketing and sales are departments with their own unique sets of goals, they both have the shared objective of appealing to and bringing in new customers and maximizing retention.

Then, the marketing or sales team will “react” by writing the proposals and hoping to win the jobs. Another thing we’ve noticed is the fact that many sales and marketing strategies are highly “reactive” at professional services firms. For example, in Hinge’s Visibility program, we’ve seen marketing departments performing lead generation or proposal writing activities at some firms, while at other firms, we’ve seen sales departments fulfilling those roles. This allows your marketing team to strategically promote the visibility of products and services while communicating how potential new customers will benefit from working with your firm.

• Traditionally, sales teams focus on revenue generation, while marketing teams acquire leads.
• When sales and marketing teams understand the company's vision as a result of applying this method, productivity and morale are boosted exponentially.
• Marketing and sales teams often face friction when they work toward disconnected objectives, prioritize different audiences, or communicate with inconsistent messaging.
• Our first step toward success was to change our strategy to do account-based targeting for the sales team and account-based marketing for the marketing team.
• From integrated technology solutions to advanced analytics and AI, our tools and expertise empower marketing and sales teams to work together and drive precision revenue growth.
• Sales and marketing teams are notoriously difficult to work together although they share the same ultimate objective of converting customers.

Driving revenue involves sales and marketing working together hand in hand. Sales people can be expressive about the fact that they don’t believe marketing should have a say when it comes to sales strategy. Regardless of the size of a company, roles often become blurred, making it hard to determine responsibilities and who’s under-performing or knocking it out the park. In some organisations, sales and marketing have lost their way. If you haven’t already, you’ll want to map out a step-by-step flow of how each of your key buyer personas decide to make a purchase.

Encourage your marketing team to help their sales siblings open conversations using social media. We assume that sales people are blessed with the gift of the gab, how to do sales and marketing alignment and for most of them, this is true. Make sure your sales team are giving marketing the information they need to effectively create the right campaign. If it’s a corporate event, let the sales team know when the invites will be sent out so they can mention it to their clients when they next speak.

On the other hand, professional services firms can increase sales by 38% when they bring sales and marketing into alignment. On the blog, Sebastian shares expert insights grounded in real-world results, making him a trusted voice for marketers seeking actionable strategies that deliver. He’s played a key role in shaping the agency’s approach to client growth, partnership development, and innovative campaign strategy. Get in touch with our experts today to find out what we can do for your marketing and sales efforts. In doing so, they could implement cross-functional planning, as both teams develop a unified plan that keeps them on track.

Stage 2: Technology integration

That’s why it’s important for sales and marketing to hold regular KPI meetings where they review, discuss, and understand the latest KPIs together. The previous section touched on the benefits of bringing representatives of sales and marketing into the same meetings. When you bring sales and marketing into a meeting to conduct discussions like this, a lot of creative solutions and “aha moments” rise to the surface. If your firm is also lacking a defined sales team, here’s an additional resource on developing a sales team structure. Once they’re assembled, you can start aligning their efforts through a mutually collaborative relationship.

Step 2: Clearly define your roles and responsibilities

Fortunately, sales and marketing have plenty of opportunities to align across joint activities with client-focused priorities. Instead, they allow their sales and marketing departments to silo themselves, resulting in setbacks to growth and profitability. Your sales department can provide golden nuggets of information that will radically improve all marketing and lead generation efforts. Therefore, it makes sense for your marketing team to work closely with sales while creating customer profiles and fine-tuning its messaging. However, the marketing team hasn’t met with sales to learn about the unique pain points and defining characteristics of the clients who are the most likely to purchase your services.

Step 5: Share Reporting and Analysis

In addition, account-based marketing can help with personalization by focusing on the most valuable target accounts that are more likely to convert. Sales should understand how marketers interact with new leads at various touchpoints, which will give sales staff some context regarding the best method of communication to use to close a deal. In mapping out the entire customer journey, sales and marketing can collaborate on personas to understand audiences, but they should also implement full-funnel thinking as they determine how customers move from initial contact to a sale. For example, there are some things you want a sales or marketing team to do, depending on the perspective. In developing strategies that achieve the target objectives, sales and marketing can work together on buyer personas that represent each audience segment.

Critically, you’ll also want to map out how the buyer makes purchasing decisions… But it’s hard to be aligned on building revenue if everyone has a different idea of who the buyer is. Overall, sales and marketing are trying to achieve the same thing – to drive and build revenue.

But if your sales team don’t know about it, it’s worthless. Hold your own monthly meetings to ensure strategic alignment and communicate the takeaways back to your teams. Your teams will be looking to you for guidance and if you openly criticise the other function in front of your team members, they will follow suit and feel comfortable do the same. Each week nominate someone from the sales team to attend the marketing weekly and vice versa.

So, if you end up feeling like you’re dealing with bickering children, why not take a leaf from the book of parenting and enforce some rules to help them to get along? If you think of your organisation as one big, happy, yet completely dysfunctional unit, then sales and marketing are the two relations who find themselves in a continuous headlock. Before Hinge, Elizabeth co-founded and ran a successful tech firm, which gives her critical insights into our professional services clients’ challenges. After all, better alignment between these two departments allows them to work together to attract the type of clients who are desperately seeking your services — and your company’s unique style of delivering them. Ultimately, if sales and marketing aren’t looking at the same KPIs in regular meetings, they’re not going to align their strategies to overcome challenges, and they could be creating more setbacks and challenges along the way.

Five Steps to Building a Brand Business Case

This doesn’t have to be overkill – too many people in one room is excessive and will kill productivity. Introduce talk-through sessions to pad out ideas before they become a reality to encourage participation from both departments and help provide buy-in at the early stages. Ensure everyone is one the same page by encouraging collaboration at ideation stage. Sustainable growth has to be a two-pronged approach with collaboration across both teams. Alignment across these two functions will ensure a cohesive approach to the growth of the business.