Why You Need to Establish Sales and Marketing Alignment, ASAP

Sales and marketing alignment can be difficult for organizations to establish. 

Sales will say:

“Marketing doesn’t provide qualified leads.” or “When marketing gives us a lead, it’s a person’s Gmail account.”

Marketing will say: 

“Sales doesn’t follow-up on the leads we give them fast enough.” or “Their (sales team) messaging is all over the place and they don’t know what they’re selling.”

There’s usually some truth to the gripes above, but it’s important for sales and marketing teams to work together. 

Due to a lack of alignment, companies are experiencing departmental friction and lost revenue opportunities. 

According to MarketingProfs, “Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions experience 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates.”

This discussion is going to take you through:

• Defining sales and marketing responsibilities 
• Lack of sales and marketing alignment pain points 
• Components of alignment that help solve those problems

Here we go. 

Defining Sales and Marketing Responsibilities 

Sales

For marketers to understand how to better work with sales, it’s important to look at key areas that they’re responsible for. 

Drive Revenue 

The primary goal, and often key metric that defines a salesperson’s success is their ability to drive company revenue. A challenging feat, but rewarding for those that are good at it. 

There are two subset tasks that aid revenue growth.  

Manage Customer Relationships

The first goal is to manage existing relationships with their customer base. When done effectively, it ultimately helps their primary efforts (driving revenue.) 

This can be the forgotten group as companies put an emphasis on acquiring new customers, but according to Forbes, research found that existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, on average, compared to new customers.

Bring in New Business

The second and equally important avenue of revenue is the ability to gain new customers that haven’t had a prior relationship with the company. Also known as obtaining, “New Logos”. 

Bringing in new business can be more challenging, but is a crucial part of establishing a growing revenue stream as most businesses will expect some level of customer churn year over year. 

An effective combination of managing existing relationships and gaining new relationships is a successful formula for the sales team’s main objective, revenue. 

Marketing 

Just as a marketer needs to understand the primary goal of sales, the sales team needs to understand the primary goal of marketing. 

Here are 3 primary goals of most marketing teams. 

Market to Existing Accounts

It’s important to stay in front of your current customer-base as they’re the most likely to buy your product/service. 

It’s easy to forget about a customer once they’ve given you that order you’ve worked so hard for, but that’s counterproductive. 

Marketers have a goal of staying in front of customers so that sales can ultimately close more deals. Some of the ways marketing aids those efforts:

• Email marketing
• Direct mail/flyers
• Content marketing
• Website updates
• Social media engagement 

For more, here are some ways to market to your current account-set. 

Help Drive Net New Logos

In this era of selling, cold calls just don’t work like they used to (although you’ll hear a story here and there that it’s not dead and Company X closed a massive deal with Customer Y). 

Your target customers have access to more information than ever, and it’s on the marketing team to ensure that your product/value-add is seen by customers. 

Check out this article for more on the difference between inbound and outbound marketing to aid your net new logo efforts. 

Establishing a Brand/Image 

In addition to assisting sales in driving revenue via current accounts and net new logos, marketing is responsible for establishing the overall brand and image of the company. 

The brand is the first thing that your current and future employees see, as well as current and future customers. 

Whether it be your company website, social media accounts, or email marketing, it’s important that you’re continually establishing/enhancing a brand. 

Some ways brands are established include:

• YouTube videos showing some ‘behind the scenes’ work
• Swag kits (hats, t-shirts, mugs, etc.) for each new employee/customer
• Consistent updates via email marketing 
• Enhanced website and overall online presence 
• Occasional (or frequent) in person events that drive interaction between customers and employees 

Some examples of well established brands include the likes of Apple, Disney, or Cartier. These brands have a cult-like following of customers that are continuously ready to purchase the latest and greatest that the company rolls out. 

Sales and Marketing Alignment Pain Points 

So far we’ve highlighted how similarly marketing and sales teams actually function, but now let’s go through some of the pain points that the departments face. 

Lack of follow-up

The most common complaint (typically from marketing) is that sales doesnt follow-up on leads fast enough. 

An example:

A new contact form submission comes through the website > marketing passes the interested buyer along to sales > sales forgets to follow up for a week > lead purchases from a competitor 

In this scenario it would be easy to put the blame on the sales team, but the responsibility of ensuring a lead is followed up on should be driven by marketing. 

When lead time on follow-ups are prolonged, both sales and marketing could’ve done a better job. 

Different offers/value add 

Confusing the customer is one of the quickest ways to ensure you lose the deal. The marketing campaign says one thing, while sales gets on the first customer call and says another.

The value-add/offer to the customer should align between sales and marketing teams to optimize messaging. 

Creating alignment among your campaigns sets clear expectations internally, and to your customers. 

Which brings us to our next point.

Divided expectations

A lack of preparation can lead to conflicted expectations throughout a marketing and sales campaign.

Sales expects that marketing will provide X number of leads, while marketing expects that sales will aid the campaign efforts for X number of hours per week.

Marketing expects the campaign to run for 3 months, while sales wants a faster cycle to hit their quarterly number. 

When two departments are expecting different outcomes, it’s difficult to run a successful sales and marketing campaign. 

Setting clear expectations doesn’t have to be complex, it can simply be a document that outlines who is responsible for what, and what a successful campaign looks like.

Moving on to our next challenge of complexity. 

Complex workflows

The workflow consists of the journey that the company will go through, and ultimately the prospective buyers throughout your sales and marketing efforts when performing an action, also known as a ‘trigger’.

Some triggers that kickoff a workflow (series of events) include but aren’t limited to:

• What happens when someone fills out a contact form on your website?
• A customer responds to an email from one of your campaigns, now what?
• A potential buyer calls into the office and is looking for pricing, how easy is it for them to get a quote?
• Digital ads are clicked and customers end up on your landing page, is it easy for them to get the information that they need?

This ultimately comes down to setting internal rules that:

1. Make it easy for the customer to get the information they’re looking for
2. Ensure that internally, everyone knows their role and who is responsible after the ‘trigger’ happens

There are tools out there like Zapier and MailChimp that can help you automate certain tasks and mitigate the manual work that your team needs to accomplish. 

Components of Sales and Marketing Alignment 

So far we’ve discussed all of the challenges that come with a lack of sales and marketing alignment; Let’s dive into the components of what successful sales and marketing alignment look like along with outcomes. 

After all, “Companies with aligned marketing and sales teams are 67% more efficient at closing deals.” according to Review42. 

Aligned goals

A defined goal should be the pillar of all sales and marketing campaigns. Some questions to help you decide what those goals are:

• Are you targeting net new clients? Current customers? Both?
• Is your team attempting to generate demand or just increase awareness? 
• Which product or solution are you focusing on? Is it a combination or more than one? 
• Does the campaign seek a certain amount of revenue? If so, how much? 

With goals that are outlined ahead of time, it becomes easier to measure success as your sales and marketing campaigns are underway. 

As Yogi Berra used to put it, “if you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.”

Expectations set

Once your goals are defined, it becomes easier to set expectations among departments. 

The marketing team might be responsible for:

• Establishing overall messaging
• Sending out initial intro emails
• Deploying digital ads and tracking
• Posting on social media

While the sales team might be responsible for:

• Follow-up calls to customers/prospects
• Visiting target audiences in person
• Sending more personalized emails
• Getting demos set up for the customer with the technical team 

Setting expectations will lead to accountability as you continue to improve your sales and marketing alignment. Knowing who is responsible for what, and when, is an important piece of the equation. 

First establish goals, then set the expectations among sales and marketing teams that’ll get you to those goals. 

Simplified process and automation 

Consider the K-I-S-S (Keep it simple, stupdid.) method when it comes to running your campaigns. Lots of wording and complex workflows can confuse your internal team, and especially the customer. 

When we say simplified process and automation, here’s an example of what we mean. 

1. Customer clicks on digital ad and ends up on your landing page
2. A contact form submission is filled out on the landing page
3. An automated email reply is sent out to the contact
4. Internal Teams/Slack message notifies sales and marketing
5. Sales follows up with the contact within 2 days

You’ll notice that a lot of the legwork in this example will have been done prior to campaign kickoff (landing page, email automation, internal message notifications, process around when sales follows-up). 

This comes from having clearly defined goals and expectations of who performs what, and when. 

Where teams can get into trouble is when:

1. Digital ads have complex messaging
2. Landing pages are filled with complex wording and pop-ups
3. Automated replies aren’t set/internal teams aren’t notified
4. Poor communication and lack of follow-up

Ultimately, your simplified messaging should help you stand out in a complex world where marketers are throwing tons of information at audiences. The automation that’s in place is there to complement your efforts. 

Closing Out Sales and Marketing Departmental Alignment 

Early on, we touched on the similarities between marketing and sales departments. 

Because the departments are meant to complement each other, we’re going to leave you with a few takeaways that should help you better align your teams: 

• Define your goal: it’s hard to align teams when there isn’t a clear goal in place.
• Set expectations: who is responsible for what? And when? Expectations mitigate confusion and hold people accountable. 
• Keep it simple: the (online) world is filled with noise, so keep it simple and make your message stand out. 

Let us know how your sales and marketing alignment efforts are going or if you need help getting them teams to work better together. 

“If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.” – Cory Booker