How to Implement a Sales and Marketing Alignment Strategy

When marketing and sales teams work together, we see a 41% increase in achieving our quotas and business goals. And it’s all because this alignment helps sales teams become 67% better at converting clients and closing deals. 

The key to business success is the collaboration between marketing and sales strategies. However, more often than not, these teams tend to function separately, disconnected from one another. 

This misalignment is not just a missed opportunity for growth – but it may be precisely why most companies fail, costing them over a trillion dollars annually. Yes, $1 trillion – that’s 12 zeros! At the same time, it’s also the number one reason why the annual revenue of a business stagnates or even declines. That’s how important the sales and marketing alignment is. 

So, have you ever wondered how sales and marketing teams can work together to achieve remarkable results? Learn everything you need to know about the power of sales and marketing alignment and how we can implement it into our strategy.

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The sales marketing alignment – or simply, smarketing – represents the idea that businesses operate under a single department that combines these two teams. This way, we integrate marketing and sales processes to optimize them and work together towards the same goals through continual communication. 

In fact, when done right, this sales marketing collaboration can:

• Generate 27% faster revenue growth
• Retain 36% more clients
• Achieve a 38% higher win rate

In other words, marketing and sales teams can still drive growth and revenue independently – of course. But when working together, they complement each other and become better, more productive, and more profitable. 

What Does Marketing Do for Sales?

The focus of our sales team is to generate revenue by closing deals, managing relationships with customers and potential customers, and optimizing sales processes. In a cross-functional team, the marketing efforts will focus on engaging clients through all stages of the purchasing cycle – especially in the beginning – to prepare them for interaction with our sales team. 

The sales funnel is represented by Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Intent, Evaluation, and Purchase. As you can see, it’s a marketing-driven funnel. So, smarketing will help us create continuity in communication with our customers, making the transition from the Evaluation to the Purchase stage smooth. Marketing can also help us increase our sales for our startup.

For this reason, marketing departments will support sales teams by:

• Creating compelling content to empower sales teams and educate clients during pitches;
• Providing information regarding our competition
• Nurturing, qualifying, and converting leads
• Engaging customers consistently
• Automating the entire lead generation process
• Developing a consistent and engaging branding message.

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What does Sales Do for Marketing?

Marketing teams will manage how customers perceive our business by building brand awareness, growing our online presence, and creating content for multiple channels. How exactly can we integrate communication with the sales teams? 

When the collaboration between sales and marketing departments is efficient, sales representatives can offer valuable insights regarding our customers’ needs and pain points. This can help marketing teams integrate the information into a compelling marketing campaign that appeals directly to our customers’ preferences. 

The marketing and sales alignment will create a feedback loop that improves marketing efforts by:

• Sharing customer insights
• Analyzing market dynamics and needs
• Providing real-world solution applications
• Creating one integrated sales marketing funnel
• Improving customer data
• Understanding the validity and reliability of our content – both in our marketing campaigns and sales pitches.

To help you create a smooth collaboration between your sales and marketing team, we’ve outlined the best practices to implement into your business strategy.

1. Create one customer journey.

Creating a smooth and continuous purchasing cycle is the key to achieving a higher win rate. And the solution to accomplishing this? The alignment between marketing and sales teams to develop one single customer journey. 

One of the biggest problems businesses have is that their customers have separate, siloed experiences – from the initial awareness stage through purchasing decisions and brand loyalty. The collaboration between these two departments will help businesses establish a holistic view of their customers using customer relationship management (CRM) software. This will draw the bridge between our marketing data and sales opportunities. 

2. Agree on messaging and content.

Let’s face it! There were multiple times when the marketing team referred to a product one thing and described it in a certain way on their website and social media, while the sales team explained it in another way during the pitch call. And this mismatched messaging will confuse potential customers. 

Our responsibility is simple: to make it extremely clear for our clients to understand what they are about to purchase. And when the sales and marketing messaging are not aligned, we risk losing the relationship with them. Believe it or not, 21% of B2B marketers have said that creating a negative customer impression is one of the most detrimental factors – and it’s all due to poor content sales and marketing alignment.

However, once these two departments are aligned, content marketing and brand messaging can become the most effective assets for closing our deals. This ensures that we nurture relationships through all stages of the sales funnel – from the top through the middle and until the bottom of the funnel.

3. Agree on customer persona.

Knowing who to sell our product to is necessary. Not completely understanding who our ideal customer is can lead to ineffective sales and marketing strategies. At the same time, there are also situations where one team has a particular view of our customer persona while the other team has another. And it’s all due to a certain disconnect between our teams. 

Close collaboration and communication between marketing and sales will help us establish exactly who our customers are and their specific needs. This way, we can organize strategies around buyer personas and develop sales enablement content that addresses their needs and pain points, leading to a higher win rate and more customers. 

4. Track joint measures.

One of the biggest issues businesses face is that marketing and sales teams track and measure their results differently. While marketing teams look at lead quantity and quality, brand awareness, and click-through rates, sales teams will focus on the numbers – the number of new accounts, conversions, and contract renewals. So, are we surprised that these departments are usually not aligned?

Of course, all departments are measuring the same thing: revenue and business growth. However, the first thing we should do when starting the smarketing alignment process is to get everyone in sync and establish joint KPIs (key performance indicators). This way, we’ll be able to track every stage of the customer journey and detect weak links – not just in a specific department but the entire funnel.

5. Have fun together!

The key to success is working with each other – as a team and as people. It’s not enough to just work together and achieve KPIs (although they are equally important). But building trust among each other will help us develop a single team, being able to rely on each other much more easily. So, we recommend organizing lunches, celebrations, brainstorming sessions, and even specific activities that bring us together. 

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Sales + Marketing = Smarketing

These two departments can work together seamlessly to share information and resources that can ultimately take both teams to the next level. While marketing teams can create content to persuade clients in the purchasing process, our sales team will be able to offer helpful information regarding competitor strategies and other insights about our potential customers. 

And the result? Increased revenue and incredible business growth!