7 Strategies to Align Sales and Marketing

In market-leading organizations, the days of functional sales and marketing silos are through. Self-informed buyers, stretched-out sales cycles, complex purchasing structures, and products evolving into solutions are all dictating a new paradigm.

What’s the new model for tighter alignment? What are strong small-to-midsize businesses doing to exceed sales quotas, lower marketing costs, and become dominant players in their markets?

Instead of a singular model, what’s happening is an evolution beyond basic marketing and sales interdependence. We’re rapidly approaching a seamless sales-marketing continuum. Many of our customers have begun integrating both functions into one revenue-generating department. The extent to which you do this will likely determine your company’s competitive standing. Consider these ideas as you envision your leadership role in creating a more aligned marketing and sales organization:

Strategy #1: Marketing and sales create a customer-centric culture

When your sales and marketing teams are at odds, buyers get exasperated. In a customer-centric culture, sales and marketing leaders cross over. No, not by communicating with the dead, but by working across old organizational boundaries and reporting levels. Leaders come to a consensus on common performance metrics, KPI dashboards, reports, and performance targets. Together, they develop a sales and marketing asset management plan that always gets the customer personalized, pertinent information that advances the process toward closing.

Strategy #2: Sales becomes marketing’s customer

Marketing views sales as its customer, not its partner. Marketers know the sales leaders and top performers they serve as unique individuals with distinct messaging needs. They work closely to avoid producing cookie-cutter programs that don’t deliver personalized value for specific customer and prospect segments. In this linear relationship, respect for sales is cultivated as the marketing and sales relationship parallels the sales and customer relationship.

Strategy #3: Marketing generates customer intelligence

Marketing is highly attuned to the target customer and provides sales with fundamental intelligence using ERP/CRM generated data, including segments, personas, needs, pain points, and selling opportunities. Marketing delivers dynamic reports showing how customer organizations are structured, how they engage with the brand, and what activities are linked to sales opportunities. Finally, marketers, not sales representatives, devise solutions and prepare sales to speak to those solutions in presentations.

Strategy #4: Sales guides content marketing

Inversely, as customer solutions are generated for sales, now sales reports back to marketing on its progress. Sales representatives proactively guide print, website, and social media content development for more specific intervals during the sales process to ensure maximum value for the customer.

Strategy #5: Marketing delivers relevant and timely content

Enriched by the steps above, marketing communications are now tied closely to sales solutions. They’re less self-serving and more informative. They’re personalized to challenge prospects to think about their own roles in incorporating your products, services, and solutions. Sales representatives now engage in insightful dialogues, differentiating your offerings not just by their features, but by how well the customer can envision their successful application. Content formats are varied to escalate engagement, with a mix of reports, case studies, white papers, webinars, and even videos.

Strategy #6: Sales responds immediately to marketing engagement

With each successive marketing contact, agreed-upon customer actions trigger an immediate and specific sales call or visit. Timely, relevant conversations lead to value-added relationships. It’s the quality of your relationships at this point that best correlates to sales conversions and customer retention.

Strategy #7: Marketing supports sales through closing

We’ve come a long way from marketing handing leads off to sales. Alignment is continuous throughout the sales cycle, and culminates in highly relevant, powerful sales support at closing. The sense of peak efficiency and accomplishment after each sale is now shared by marketing and sales, or, what has evolved into your aligned revenue-generating department.

Is your company progressing toward alignment between marketing and sales? What are some of the lessons you have learned as you have gone through this process? Share your thoughts with us on Facebook!