Is your Sales and Marketing Aligned?

Ignoring the misalignment between your sales and marketing teams can be costly. In fact, misalignment in sales and marketing is the number one reason why a company’s annual revenue stagnates or, worse, decreases. 

Failure to align your sales and marketing teams leads to wasted budget and resources. That means that between 60-70% of B2B content is not being used and most leads are not converting into sales.

That is not good news for any business! 

So, how can you get your sales and marketing teams to align? 

The answer is Smarketing.

What Is Smarketing? 

You probably have worked out that Smarketing is a blend of the two words sales and marketing. But it is so much more than that. 

Smarketing is when the sales and marketing teams work seamlessly to win more business.

What Are the benefits Of Smarketing?

Businesses that have adopted “Smarketing” have seen a significant increase in their sales. 

According to Aberdeen Group CMO’s Agenda Report, successfully aligning your sales and marketing means you can:

1. Retain 36% more customers

2. Generate 32% more in revenue

3. Obtain 38% higher win rates

Furthermore, other research found that companies that have aligned their sales and marketing achieved 24% faster growth. Consequently, this leads to a 27% faster profit growth in a one-year period.

That is impressive, right? 

So, how do you check whether your company’s sales and marketing are aligned? 

Well, here are some tell-tale signs to look out for…

1. No Clear Accountability

Who is accountable for lead generation? What is the quality of leads? Is the sales team spending the right amount of time on qualified leads? Are they giving timely feedback to marketing? If the accountability is not clearly defined, the blame game starts between sales and marketing. “You don’t follow up on leads” or “You don’t give me the right leads” are common blame game examples.

What to do: Clearly define accountability of the sales and marketing team. Evaluate their performance using same standard and metrics, driven by a common goal.

2. Poor Communication

Many a times, the marketing team has little knowledge about the sales process and the sales team has poor awareness of the marketing areas. Each function may be quite ignorant about the activities carried out by the other function. This is a big barrier in communication.

What to do: Sales and marketing need to hold regular meetings to discuss the goals, progress, and gaps, develop strategies and action plan together. All this to ensure results for the organization. 

3. Generic Content and Messaging When your marketing team creates generic content and messaging, your message does not resonate with the target customer and you do not stand out from the competition. This means your sales team ends up sounding like every other company and lose deals as a result.

What to do: sales and marketing should work together to establish terminology and content that will keep them in sync and give your company a competitive edge. Content should be relevant to the target market and buyer’s stage in the buying cycle, based on a shared understanding of the two teams.

4. Different Training If your sales team enjoys the privileges of motivational talks, team building activities, attending events and get incentives while your marketing team trains on products, industry insights and promotions, they end up on completely different pages.

What to do: get them to train, learn and build together. Send them to the same conferences and meetings so they stay aligned. Give them similar opportunities to learn. 

5. Different Software

When sales and marketing functions work on different software, it affects their productivity and makes them less effective.

What to do: Maintain a central customer database. A CRM that can integrate your sales and marketing will allow the sales team to see the latest interaction on a lead, while the marketing team can keep an eye on the customer’s journey.

The Bottom Line

As sales and marketing are pivotal to your business, building a strong connection between the two is paramount.  

Smarketing is much more than just a cool word. It is an entirely new way of thinking.

So, if you want to take your business to a different level and start to see an increase in revenue – it is time to get your smarketing in place.