Previously in this blog, we looked at what happens when product development and marketing are not aligned: you end up with products that developers find cool or interesting, but your customers have no use for. The solution is to bring marketing insights into the product development process, and have product developers explain the use cases and benefits of a product to marketers.

Just as marketing insights help developers create products more aligned with the needs of your customers, collaboration between marketing and sales results in clearer, focused, and personalized messaging that converts more leads.

Keys to Alignment

Shared Goals

While sales and marketing are related fields, they are not the same. They are part of the same process of attracting new customers or convincing old customers to return. Within this interdependent relationship, marketing ultimately serves sales. Marketers might resist this claim, as it might read like “the sales department is more important than the marketing department” or “sales is in charge of marketing.” What it actually means is that everything marketing does, whether recognizing customer needs, building awareness, or gaining trust, is in service of generating leads for sales to convert.

To get these two departments working in harmony, they must recognize that they share the same goals. Rather than separate marketing goals and sales goals, outline company goals. Build your strategy around a unique selling point, determining what kinds of customers sales needs and how marketing can attract them. This involves identifying an ideal customer and mapping out the customer journey.  

Different KPIs

But just because their goals are the same doesn’t mean all of their KPIs will be the same. The two departments will share some KPIs, like customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost, but there are some things marketing does that sales doesn’t and vice versa.

For example, the business’s goal might be to increase revenue by 10% this year. Marketing metrics will prioritize brand awareness, trust, and number of new leads generated. Sales metrics will include a number of new accounts, size of deals, and upsell rate. These KPIs support those shared goals and reflect the two groups’ different roles in achieving those goals. For more on the importance of choosing the right KPIs, see this article.

Customer Centricity

When you identify your ideal customer and map out their journey, you’re in a strong position to produce more personalized marketing content. Personalized marketing brings in the right kinds of leads, addresses their pain points, and guides them through every stage of their journey. As a result, sales will be better equipped to close the deal. Sales usually has a closer relationship with customers. Marketing should lean on this knowledge as they tailor content to suit the customer’s needs.

Strategies for Collaboration

Sales and marketing don’t have to work together every day on everything they do, but there should be well-defined processes for when and how they come together. If they do their jobs completely separately, they can’t share information about customer needs, and neither team will be able to do their job as effectively. Furthermore, marketing and sales teams that don’t collaborate might produce misaligned messaging that confuses your leads and damages trust. Every customer wants to trust the business they’re buying from. Honesty is the foundation of trust, and a big part of honesty is consistency. You don’t want to sound like a guilty suspect constantly changing their story.

The two teams might collaborate only when passing on leads, or they can be thoroughly intertwined. Marketing might simply pass the baton to sales at some point in the customer journey, or they might work together throughout the customer journey, as they do in Account-Based Marketing.

Passing the Baton

Depending on your industry and customer base, marketing and sales might not be working hand-in-hand all the time. While they will always be working toward the same goals, they might only meet each other at one point in the customer journey. That point is when a lead moves from being a marketing qualified lead—that is, a lead that is being marketed to—to a sales qualified lead, or a lead that is in communication with the sales team. At this point, marketing will share all of their information on the account with sales to help sales move the lead through the sales pipeline. This act of passing the baton from marketing to sales is an opportunity to stay on the same page with consistent, personalized messaging across all customer touchpoints.

Account-Based Marketing

In markets where annual contract value (ACV) is high and relative number of opportunities are low, businesses need a focused strategy for identifying and converting leads. Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a sales philosophy that aligns sales and marketing to target high-value accounts. Together, sales and marketing identify a set of target companies and create a personalized plan for marketing and selling to them. We are certified ABM practitioners and can help set you up with the skills and technology you need to execute an ABM selling strategy. Follow this link for more information on ABM.

Enable Alignment With the Right Technology

Sales are working from their spreadsheets and playbooks, while marketing is working with their own content creation software, and marketing campaign plans, and without a strategy that brings the two together, they will happily toil in their own silos without knowing what the other is doing.

Without a CRM, marketing might generate leads, but not know how or if sales closed those leads. Or they might generate the wrong kind of leads. Marketing might send one message, sales another, and trust with the customer is lost. Without the two teams sharing data and knowledge, it becomes harder to understand what works and what doesn’t, and why. With a CRM, every point of data, every lead, every account, every communication is available to both teams so that collaboration can continue smoothly, whether marketing is passing leads to sales or the two are working closely together as part of an ABM sales strategy.

Alignment: A Necessary Cultural Change

Cross-functional alignment is a cultural change that, when executed at all levels of a business, gets everyone pulling in the same direction. Individual departments might value their independence, hoard their knowledge, and resist collaboration. Even worse, marketing might feel devalued, like they are being subordinated to sales. A business strategy, company-wide goals, and appropriate metrics for success take the anxiety out of alignment, recasting it as a conversation, a partnership, with both departments serving the goals of the business. When sales and marketing are aligned, one department’s win is everybody’s win.