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CLICK HEREWhen your sales and marketing departments don’t align, it is inevitable that problems within your business will develop. Inadequate cross-departmental communication leads to poor strategy and execution. If your business suffers from this problem, don’t worry you are not alone! According to Forrester Research, 92% of companies have a sales and marketing alignment problem. By focusing on aligning your departments you can expect to see growth in your annual revenue. Below are 3 tips you can use to help progress your sales and marketing alignment.
- Align Marketing Activities to Sales Objectives- in order to gain cooperation between your departments you need first align their goals. Identify the key objectives your business wishes to meet; these could include customer acquisition and retention tactics ass well as revenue and upsell. Determine which initiatives support the mutual objectives. Your marketing team likely has a key audience or buyer persona in mind; your sale steam is also targeting a particular buyer. This means that your sales and marketing teams should have a common understanding of each other’s buyer personas to ensure that your marketing team is attracting the right audience in order to dive prospects into the sales funnel.
- Create Consistent Marketing Collateral for Sales and Marketing- your sales and marketing teams should work together to ideate and execute messages and materials which creates content that meets mutual objectives. Try storing documents, like emails and case studies in a cloud-based format, this way employees can access any information at any time and not waste time looking for information.
- Integrate CRM and Marketing Technology- integrating CRM software with your marketing strategy can help your business better align your sales and marketing activities. With your teams working from the same platform you are able to implement marketing automation. Both teams thus have access to campaign performance to better align with their success. CRM allows you to import contacts as well as marketing them from a single system, which further helps align your team’s efforts. By adopting a CRM software, your marketing team can align email campaigns with the sales cycle and reach customers at the right time in the consumer buying cycle.
By implementing these few simple steps, you can expect to increase annual revenue by 20% as well as maximizing prospect engagement and profitability. Aligning your marketing and sales teams should be an ongoing process within your organization. Ensure that your business has the right technology in place to help aid the communication process between your sales and marketing teams. This allows your business to communicate and collaborate on customer acquisition, conversion and retention and ultimately benefits your business for the long run.
