The marketing and sales teams work in a customer-first culture. To succeed the teams need to focus on the creation of experiences that address buyer’s issues. Instead of focusing in closing sales, reps as well as marketers must work with each other to develop engaging experiences for buyers in their journey through the buying process.
When marketing and sales teams collaborate and collaborate, they can create new opportunities, and ultimately gain new customers. Examples:
Marketing and sales alignment could result in an increase of 32% in revenue growth year-over-year.
78 percent of executives who buy from salespersons do not have the right documents. (Aberdeen Group)
Just 6 percent of B2B marketers say they are able to accurately measure the effectiveness of their content by using indicators that measure the impact of their business across the entire pipeline.
What is the definition of effective sales and marketing alignment?
To make the buyer the first priority both marketing and sales teams must collaborate to produce relevant, high-quality and valuable content throughout the buyer’s journey. The alignment between marketing and sales is based on a common goal as well as objectives and business goals. Leaders in marketing and sales should collaborate and create an approach to reach common objectives like pipeline and income generation.
What are the signs that the teams aren’t in alignment?
The dissociation of marketing and sales teams can result in silos that hinder collaboration. We’ve observed that when marketing and sales teams are not aligned and have different goals, they can face challenges like:
Teams are able to set their own goals as well as objectives and priorities.
Training for sales and onboarding takes too long
Insufficient communication or collaboration in campaigns
The sales process doesn’t align with the selling procedures
Sales struggle to guide buyers through deals
Marketing struggle to grasp the return on investment of their content
Alignment best practices
Enablement aims to bridge the gap and help align marketing and sales teams around the same goals and objectives. As companies begin to implement best practices in enablement They could:
Set revenue goals that are shared
centralize sales education and coaching
Find and work together to overcome communication barriers
Work together to create buyer personas and the buyer’s journey
Collaboration on content for sales
Deliver the most popular content to sales through automation and integrations
Review content and track engagement throughout the sale cycle.
How can you promote alignment between marketing and sales?
The tradition of siloed marketing and sales teams is no longer relevant in the present B2B environment. The Go-to-Market (GTM) teams must share the same goals and work towards closing deals and driving revenue. There are several ways that your marketing and sales teams can cooperate to eliminate the barriers.
Pipeline goals and shared revenue
When GTM teams have agreed on revenue and pipeline targets Sales and marketing leaders can look backwards to come up with an action plan. If your goal for pipeline is $20 million, then the marketing and sales leadership will decide how many leads will must be created and how many calls will need to be scheduled and how many demonstrations are required to meet the goal. When they work together to create the perfect buyer journey both marketing and sales teams can see the ways in which their efforts can will contribute to the common goals.
Encourage collaboration and competition that is positive
It’s great fun to work in teams however there is always a need to have healthy rivalries. When you and your GTM team has decided on its goals and objectives for the next quarter, it could be enjoyable to participate in cross-functional competitions and celebrate the individual and collective wins. You could think about a race for 200 form conversions for marketing, or 200 demonstrations to sales representatives. The only thing that is important is that your marketing and sales reps stay active and enjoy themselves. The bottom line is that both sales and marketing teams share an equal adversary: your rivals.
It can increase productivity, however collaboration can increase efficiency. It’s just natural that your sales team has the top performers. They have important insights they can communicate with colleagues to enhance overall performance of the department. For instance If a sales rep has a high level of proficiency on initial calls, they could collaborate with reps who are less experienced to share their knowledge and assist them in improving their skills.
Establish shared lines of communication
Communication is at the heart of all relationships. Why should the relationships between marketing and sales be different? Since both companies are working towards the same goals, periodic updates and checks-ins are required to identify gaps, progress and opportunities.
Different types of communication are appropriate at various levels in business. While the marketing and sales leadership might need to meet regularly to discuss status updates, individual contributors might only have to take part in an annual session with members of the GTM team. informal and ad-hoc channels such as Slack as well as Microsoft Teams can be used to amazing impact when marketing and sales share channels. These are excellent places for sales reps to request recommendations on content from a meeting they’re planning with prospects.
It’s a sad fact 70 percent of content produced by marketers is never used by the sellers. There are a myriad of reasons that can are responsible for this and the most significant is the management of content and discovery.
Sellers aren’t allowed to use content they aren’t aware of. If content isn’t properly stored in shared drives, discovering is almost impossible. The good news is that software for managing content makes it simple for marketers to store the content they produce and organize it in that sales representatives are able to access it easily. Quality software gives marketers and sellers the tools needed to collaborate and manage content to ensure that handoffs are seamless. In the end, sales reps can access the information they require across the stages of sales, products or buyer personas.
Prioritize sales enablement
Businesses that employ intelligent enablement usually are more successful. According to the annual 2021 Benchmark Report for Sales Enablement 90% of the leaders in enablement considered sales enablement to be an enabler strategic to their company. Companies that use enablement on a large level, integrate enablement in every phase of the customer’s lifecycle. In 2020, the same companies achieved quota 120% success.
Sales enablement can be a powerful tool because it’s the thread that connects the marketing and sales priorities of both departments. Prioritizing enablement is about giving leaders in enablement a place in the room. As enablement leaders aid in bring together marketing and sales teams as they are accountable to the C-suite, leaders in enablement can provide visibility towards GTM aligning at top levels of business.
What are the advantages of smart technology?
If your sales, marketing and customer success teams are an integral part of the GTM engine, these teams are able to collaborate to accomplish shared goals. The software for enablement provides GTM teams a collaborative environment for managing content, as well as many other functions which can be
Smart enablement goes beyond the mere management of content. Effective enablement can be found in every phase of sales cycle. It starts with coaching, training, and accelerating sales reps. Smarter enablement is also about giving sales reps the knowledge and tools needed to be able to effectively interact with clients and customers. In this digital age this means tools like social selling, customizing email templates, as well as digital sales rooms.
These tools allows sellers to connect and assist buyers throughout the sales process. For instance sales representatives may initially connect with a potential buyer via LinkedIn and then follow up via email. If they get a successful initial call, they may draw insights from the call to develop specific content that can be given to the buyer through an online sales room. Based on the buyer’s preferences and the content they share by sales representatives, they can utilize tools for sales training and coaching to improve their abilities and get the most of every customer engagement.
What’s next?
Sales are more challenging than ever. In the age of digital sales reps have less opportunities to connect with buyers which is why they must ensure that every interaction counts. The best way to increase buyer engagement is through the alignment of marketing and sales. If sales and marketing have the same goals, sales representatives are able to collaborate with marketing to produce and access information that is most relevant to their clients. Sales enablement can aid in strengthening this partnership by helping go-to market teams to achieve their mutual goals, and eventually, increase revenue and pipeline.
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