Why sales and marketing alignment is a must for faster business growth

A while back I wrote a blog about the importance for businesses to build trust in these uncertain times and the central role content plays in building those long-term relationships and ensuring businesses add value to customers and prospects through all stages of the buying cycle.

As inbound marketing techniques and the use of digital channels to reach audiences has become more widely adopted to draw qualified leads, the level of self-education among B2B buyers by the time they connect with sales is much higher.

With such a high emphasis on content, alignment on strategic content planning between marketing and sales should be a top priority for businesses who are looking for efficient business growth. So why are so many B2B businesses still suffering from sales and marketing misalignment?

The battle between sales and marketing

Shouldn’t sales teams trust marketing professionals to understand the right content needed to build relationships, and shouldn’t marketing teams trust sales to understand and communicate back the sort of content needed at the bottom of the funnel, when validation and provider selection take place?

Well in an ideal world, both teams would be doing just that and together supporting the customer journey from MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) to SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads). This should be done in an environment of constant testing, learning and innovation where customer satisfaction and delivering customer value are joint goals.

Sadly that’s rarely the case. I’ve worked with quite a few organisations where the sales and marketing teams are not only misaligned, they are outright hostile to each other. Marketing can’t understand why their leads are not being followed up, and sales don’t value the leads they are given. This naturally leads to each team undervaluing each other’s roles in impacting on business growth, not only affecting the culture within the organisation, and people bringing the best of themselves to work, but also a more immediate financial impact – the bottom line. When sales and marketing aren’t aligned, but work as separate silos the entire system of business growth – and importantly efficient business growth – breaks down.

Working together

So what does marketing and sales alignment look like in practice? Really it’s the ability to bring the process of gaining MQLs and SQLs together through joined up working practices. These include everything from how, when and what the teams communicate with each other, through to joint content planning sessions for inbound marketing campaigns, and buyer enablement content to agreed lead scoring criteria and joint KPIs. The goal of alignment is to focus jointly on one business outcome that impacts directly on a business’s ability to continue growing: revenue.

Rather than marketing focusing on the number of leads they can deliver to sales, they focus on the quality of the pipeline they are delivering to sales and keeping sales up to date with content performance and engagement. And sales focus not only on conversion but retention too. Central to this approach is putting the customer at the centre of all activity – something that gets easily forgotten in the rush to grow a business as fast as possible.

Start as you mean to go on

In summary, collaboration between sales and marketing is vital for the financial health of all businesses, regardless of their size, and those who can achieve it are at a distinct advantage against those who still operate an outdated division of departments. However, it requires proper planning and ongoing training and a willingness from the top down to implement a culture of collaboration.

Seven ways businesses can ensure sales and marketing align in practice are:

1. Start as you mean to go on; set up regular meetings, reporting and opportunities for sales and marketing to collaborate and communicate. As you scale up this will be key to ensuring your teams don’t become separate silos

2. Ensure sales feed into the content development process; they are objection handling on a daily basis and as a result have front-line intelligence

3. Make sure marketing update sales on the content they are producing – whether it’s thought leadership brand awareness pieces or infographics showing product comparisons

4. Hold regular opportunities for both teams to review the content being produced and crucially, how it is performing and look for ways to adapt and improve what’s being produced

5. If you are using ABM alongside inbound marketing, partner marketing and sales together around specific accounts. This will ensure more streamlined business decisions and speeds up the process of delighting those prospects with personalised, targeted content

6. Establish joint KPIs to achieve a single goal; revenue is a better indication of ROI than number of leads

7. Set up sales training for marketing teams and vice versa; understanding each other’s challenges is key to establishing empathy between the two teams