9 Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices

October 25, 2021

Rachael

When you’re not meeting your revenue goals, the finger-pointing starts between your sales and marketing teams. Sales blames marketing for not generating enough leads. Marketing blames sales for not converting the leads into customers. Sales and marketing alignment is missing. This can go back and forth, creating hostility between two groups who need to be working together. Sales and marketing have the same goal – to increase customers and revenue. To achieve this, you need to curb the finger-pointing and get the two teams to align and work together.

Use these best practices to align your sales and marketing teams.

Increase communication

First, get out of silos and learn about the other team’s goals. The easiest way to do this is to schedule regular meetings with both teams. During these meetings, sales can educate marketing on their process and review quotas and metrics. Marketing can then share what initiatives they are working on, what campaigns are running, and what metrics they are tracking.

Create a Content Process

Marketing should include sales in their content brainstorming process. Together, the teams can generate content ideas helpful for sales to gain new leads. From there, sales can promote content in conversations with prospects, and on their personal social media channels. Video is a great way to promote new content with prospects. The use of video is growing as a marketing tool. It is an effective, personal way to communicate that builds trust and increases sales.

Promote the Sales Team

When marketing focuses on promoting thought leadership and expertise at the company, they should not overlook the sales team. Make sure to include sales in new content. These are the individuals that prospects interact with the most, so marketing can promote them through guest blogs and social media posts.

Understand Your Roles & Goals

It’s critical for sales and marketing to truly understand what each team member’s role is, and how it helps the company achieve its goals. Sales might not understand why someone writes a blog, and how that content helps generate leads. Marketing might not know how sales breaks down each person’s responsibilities – whether they sell to specific regions, or they each sell a specific product. It’s important to break down any misconceptions, create clarity around what each person does, and how it helps sales and marketing alignment.

Related Reading: 6 KPIs for Sales & Marketing Alignment

Identify Your Target Audience

To hit company goals, it’s essential for sales and marketing to understand which potential customers they are targeting. Marketing needs to know who to target with their content, keywords, and ads. Sales needs to know who they are selling to. Get everyone on the same page by creating buyer personas and a buyer’s journey map showing how they make purchasing decisions. The buyer personas should include the buyers’ demographics, size of the organization they work at, type of organization, role, priorities, and challenges. In the journey map, make sure to document what activities the buyer engages in, his or her objectives, what information he or she consumes (or needs), and what types of communication he or she uses to get the information.

It’s important for sales and marketing to share feedback they get from clients and prospects with each other. When the marketing team gathers data from surveys or feedback forms, they must share the results with the sales team. It’s also important for sales to share what they’re learning on calls with prospects, such as what questions they have about the product or company, what misconceptions they have, what they like about the product, and more. This will help marketing figure out what gaps need to be filled with their content, on their website, and in their campaigns to better promote the company and attract qualified leads.

Does your marketing team have a plethora of blogs, white papers, and even one-sheets and brochures that they keep within their marketing files? This content is meant to fuel the sales team, so they must have access to it. Create a shared space (whether it’s on Teams, Slack, or another platform) where the two teams can share content. This will help your sales team feel more enabled, and it will help demonstrate what marketing is doing to help them.

Socialize

To get the sales and marketing teams to work together better, they need to get to know each other. Organizing social activities with both teams can help improve the relationships between team members. This helps cultivate a collaborative environment where everyone feels included.

Understand Each Other

Finally, one of the most important ways to achieve sales and marketing alignment is to create an understanding that both teams are trying to help the company – and each other – achieve their business goals. While both teams have different tasks, their end-goal and intentions are the same.

About Sales & Marketing Alignment Services at Lake One

At Lake One, technology is at the core of all our sales and marketing thinking.

We work with our partners to make sure their basecamp is “right sized” for their organization.
That the goals and strategy are leading the technology choices and not the other way around.
But most of all – that the technology is embraced and providing value to the organization.

For additional tips on how to align your sales and marketing teams, contact Lake One to talk to our experts.