I was working on a project recently and came across a situation that is all too common. The sales and marketing teams of this particular company have no alignment whatsoever.
This scenario happens a lot. Sales teams go one way and marketing goes another. This helter-skelter approach can produce results, particularly when the sales and marketing teams are good at what they do, but ultimately your organization is losing opportunities. One Linkedin study shows that 87% of sales and marketing leaders think collaboration between sales and marketing teams is critical to growth.
What is Sales and Marketing Alignment
Simply put, sales and marketing alignment is the process of creating an environment where the two teams work together to create a cohesive and seamless experience for potential customers. The idea is that from the first contact someone has with your business until they eventually become a customer and beyond, there should be one seamless experience with your organization.
Why Sales and Marketing Should Be Aligned
When Sales and Marketing are aligned it is sometimes described as a superpower. Coming from a sports background, I think of it more like what it takes for a championship team to go all the way. To win, you need to be more than the sum of your parts. By working together as a cohesive unit, individual contributors can produce a greater effort than they could if each part worked in isolation.
Each team generates leads, cultivates relationships, contributes to sales, and ultimately nurtures the relationship over the long run in its own way. They both collect unique insights through the way they interact with potential customers, but neither team can see the full picture on their own. If left to their own devices Sales and Marketing teams can at best create an incomplete experience for customers and potential customers, and at worst develop complete chaos.
Common Reasons They Aren’t Aligned
Reasons why sales and marketing aren’t aligned can vary widely. Maybe the organization is growing and working through issues. Maybe no one has recognized the value of collaboration yet. Or maybe it's driven by egos, or is a symptom of poor management.
No matter what the cause, a lack of understanding of what the other team does daily will contribute to the lack of integration. Whether you’re on the phone closing deals or generating marketing content and moving contacts through the funnel, it's easy to get lost in your day-to-day work and forget the bigger picture. Yes, what you are doing is contributing to the success of the organization, but you may be missing out on opportunities to work more efficiently and cohesively.
Ways To Start Working Towards Shared Goals
It's important for sales and marketing to create shared goals. Each team will be doing their part to try and reach a revenue target, but if they never talk, they could be going about it in two different ways that aren’t complementary to each other.
The goal is to create an experience that not only turns a prospect into a buyer but keeps them coming back over and over again.
Disorganization can lead to attribution wars. Marketers doing everything in their power to prove that they generated a lead and sales reps sending messages to anyone and everyone so they can claim they had the first touch. These behaviors are unhealthy, unproductive, and worst of all, create a bad experience for users and potential customers.
Competition can be healthy, but it's important to incentivize sales and marketing representatives to pursue the right actions. Being “first” doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it can waste time and effort trying to prove that you “won”.
Leaders need to think big picture about how the actions their teams take impact the buyer's journey. From there Sales and Marketing can coordinate activities that are producing high-quality, valuable touch points that produce a consistent and comprehensive experience.
The most impactful thing that sales and marketing teams can do to start working towards alignment is to create a culture that prioritizes communication. It’s not necessarily easy or fast, but it's something organizations can start working on immediately. This study suggests that about half of sales and marketing teams don’t have a shared definition of what a lead is. Developing shared definitions, terminology and goals is the first step to begin building a constant and consistent feedback loop.
Teamwork makes the dream work
Teamwork makes the dream work. It is definitely a cliché, but anyone who’s ever been on a high-performing team before knows that it’s the truth. For a lot of organizations sales and marketing operate as two separate entities, when in reality they should act as one revenue team. Marketing creates content and initiatives that help generate awareness which eventually turns into leads and creates processes that continue delighting customers after they have made a purchase. The sales team identifies opportunities and turns those opportunities into customers and around and around we go.
As much as you may want to put sales in marketing into separate boxes, you simply can’t do it. The reason is that the buyer's journey is becoming more and more complicated, with more ways than ever that buyers and sellers can be connected. In fact, most B2B buyers only speak with a rep for about 17% of their buyer's journey, and they may only spend 5-6% of their time speaking with 1 specific company.
By working together your company can leverage the power of both teams to combine efforts, understand the full buyer’s journey and buying cycle, and complement each other’s strengths to create an environment of continuous improvement and growth.
Conclusion
I am a big believer in communication and transparency throughout a company. I believe organizations gain more by being open and honest than they do by trying to hoard information. Operations, accounting, marketing, sales, management, and any other department should at least know someone from the other departments and be able to speak freely about what they do if they choose. So, in my opinion, departments that work closely together should communicate constantly to share ideas and continue improving. Organizations that fail to align their sales and marketing fail to live up to their full potential.
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