Sales and marketing are two business functions that impact revenue growth. They work best when aligned to maximize lead generation and customer engagement.
But despite being highly interconnected, they don’t always get along. For example, when a new product fails to perform as expected, marketing often blames sales professionals for their ineffective strategies.
Marketing
Marketing focuses on creating brand awareness, nurturing customer relationships, and driving sales over the long term. They develop value propositions and persuasive messaging that distinguish products from competitors and promote them through a variety of channels. Sales translates these messages into tangible business opportunities.
Both departments need clear, measurable goals that align with the rest of the company’s strategy and objectives. Metrics should be attainable, relevant, and time-bound to ensure both teams’ success.
Sharing data democratizes information between the two departments, allowing them to create and compare metrics that measure their collaborative efforts. This approach helps identify and address any obstacles that may be affecting their performance, such as an overabundance of Marketing Qualified Leads or the inability to convert leads into customers. This will also help them identify opportunities to improve their processes or tactics to drive more business for the organization. Ultimately, this can reduce squabbling and enable both teams to work together toward the common goal of maximizing revenue.
Sales
Sales is the process of converting a potential customer into a paying client. It includes interpersonal interaction, such as one-on-one meetings, calls, and networking. This interaction typically involves the sale of a product or service to an individual, as well as contract negotiations and post-call account servicing. The sales department also handles upselling and cross-selling by suggesting additional products or services that would benefit the customer, such as a recurring subscription to software as a service.
Marketing and sales teams must work together to meet their respective goals and drive revenue for the organization. Having open communication, shared objectives, and real-time data-sharing will ensure a unified approach that amplifies each team’s efforts rather than diluting them. When these teams operate with a unified vision, it strengthens the entire company and improves the overall customer experience.
Alignment
Sales and marketing alignment—or smarketing—requires collaboration, common goals, and a shared approach to business growth. A lack of alignment leads to a disconnect between teams, and the resulting miscommunications can cost companies up to 10% in revenue per year.
Establishing tighter alignment requires centralized communication and a regular distribution cadence for updates to ensure both teams are in the loop. In addition, meetings between the two teams should occur regularly to encourage 2-way communication and to review progress towards shared goals (such as monthly lead quality metrics and lead-to-customer conversion rates).
Marketing teams can support sales by delivering content that helps nurture and qualify leads, providing competitive intelligence, and ensuring buyers are educated throughout the customer journey. A unified approach to content marketing and sales enablement also increases lead-to-customer conversion rates. In addition, defining and assigning methodologies, processes, and terminologies aligns teams by reassuring both departments that their roles are equally important to overall company success.
Communication
Communication is the key to getting your sales and marketing teams working together. It might mean weekly meetings or using a CRM to share data-driven insights. Either way, the goal is to get the departments on the same page about the business goals of generating leads, nurturing warm leads and closing new business prospects.
The sales process involves interpersonal interaction, and it is primarily a one-on-one conversation with a customer over the phone, in person or by email. It involves learning about the customer’s pain points and explaining how a particular product or service can help meet those needs. Khris Steven HighLevel Offer is a great trial platform that you could use.
Often, the relationship between Marketing and Sales is like that of a navigator and pilot. The navigator determines the destination, describes the route and prepares alternative routes to account for shifting realities. The pilot then executes the plan with the passengers in tow. Having these two functions work together can increase your company’s bottom line. However, if you don’t address the issues that lead to miscommunication and misunderstanding, the results can be disastrous.