Struggling with Sales & Marketing Alignment? Try These Must-Follow Tips

It takes four days for leads to hear back from sales….BDRs aren’t incentivized to engage with inbound leads….Marketing guides collect dust in Dropbox….
☝️All of these are examples of poor sales and marketing alignment. And that lack of alignment is killing your revenue potential.

Luckily, these major issues are completely fixable. In this guide, we take a peek at what true alignment looks like and offer you actionable ways to get your teams working together toward revenue-driving goals.

What is sales and marketing alignment?

Sales and marketing alignment refers to all of the ways these two departments work together to drive, capture, nurture, and close leads. Aligned teams share common goals and metrics, collaborate within the same software, utilize customer data to the fullest, and support each other through creating campaigns and revamping processes.

Examples of sales and marketing alignment

What does sales and marketing alignment really look like?
Let’s dive in. Below, we’ve got real-world examples of how sales and marketing teams are supporting each other every day.

How sales helps marketing

Here are some examples of real ways that sales teams can support marketing efforts:

• Persona refinement – Sales teams talk to ideal customers every day. They can help marketers better understand ICPs (Ideal Customer Profile) and develop details that bring personas to life.
• Lead and campaign criteria – Experienced account executives or sales leaders can determine the criteria for marketing-qualified leads. This way, marketers can accurately optimize campaign creatives and budgets.
• Content distribution – Marketing teams can rely on sales reps to share great content via their LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media channels and directly with leads.
• Customer introductions – When they need to interview customers, marketing teams can ask sales reps for relevant introductions based on the contacts they’re looking for.
• Research for content creation – Sales reps have a ton of insights they can share with marketers to help them create better content.
• Competitor intelligence – Sales reps know which competitors people are switching to or considering. This data is invaluable for all sorts of marketing campaigns.
• Market trends – Sellers can also provide marketers with market intelligence, like current trends, common pain points, new technology, customer goals, etc.
• Referral or affiliate program growth – Because they have a direct relationship with customers, sellers can often be more successful at enrolling people in the referral or affiliate program than marketing broadcasts.

How marketing helps sales

And of course, marketing returns the favors. 😊 Here are examples of how marketing teams assist sales:

• Lead generation – A high-performing marketing team ensures that sales executives aren’t dependent completely on outbound campaigns but can rely on inbound demand as well.
• Sales enablement – Marketing teams can create buyer’s guides, competitor comparison pages, blog posts, online courses, templates, case studies, and other materials that will help the sales team nurture and educate their leads.
• Cold email or call script writing – Marketing teams can provide on-brand email templates, cold calling scripts, direct message templates, and more to help sales teams test and optimize their messaging.
• Targeted campaigns – When the sales team wants to target a new niche, industry, geographical market, or other buyer segment, the marketing team can run paid and organic campaigns to deliver a higher volume of leads than what the sales team could achieve alone.
• Account-based marketing – ABM marketers can run multichannel marketing campaigns to target key accounts online and offline, delivering interested buyers to account executives.
• Marketing data insights – Marketing campaigns provide a wealth of information on the pain points and benefits customers are currently responding to. Sales teams can implement these insights in their own messaging.
• Lead scoring – Marketing teams can implement lead scoring in their CRM or conversational marketing platforms to help sales reps automatically identify which leads to prioritize.
• Lead handoff – Passing off marketing-qualified leads quickly— and with the maximum amount of data and context—ensures that sales reps can make the most of every opportunity.

Benefits of sales and marketing alignment

There’s a reason why sales and marketing alignment is so buzzworthy. It offers a ton of benefits to the organizations that get it right.

Implementation of customer data

In today’s world, data is gold. You don’t want to waste it. Sales and marketing teams that work well together have a single source of truth for customer data so that each team can use it to the fullest—whether automating campaigns or reaching out directly with custom messaging.

Utilization of marketing assets

Marketing assets that don’t get used equal a ton of wasted effort and missed opportunities. But when sales teams are plugged into marketing, they know about the existing assets, utilize them, and request the creation of new assets according to customer needs.

Faster lead handoffs

Inefficient lead handover processes can lead to days-long waits, but when your teams are better aligned, reps can respond to leads in under two hours. The quicker your sales team responds to leads, the better your chances for acquiring that customer—instead of letting them fall into the hands of your competitors.

Lower customer acquisition cost

Well-aligned teams can drive favorable metrics, including a lower customer acquisition cost (CAC). Marketing teams that regularly communicate with sales can collect the customer-centric insights they need to target the segments that are most likely to convert.

Reliable revenue growth

Sales and marketing alignment yields consistent, incremental growth. Teams that work together are better at identifying issues in the customer journey and making regular optimizations.

Time savings and efficiency

Misaligned teams double up on each other’s work, spend forever locating resources, and fail to complete projects. Aligned teams eliminate waste by utilizing existing data, tech, assets, and other resources. They save time and get key tasks handled more efficiently.

11 tips and best practices for aligning your sales and marketing teams

Ready to align your sales and marketing teams like never before?
Follow these essential tips and best practices.

1. Create shared goals

Of course, they’ll still have their own aims, but both teams must have shared goals. This is essential for meaningful alignment with big revenue impacts.
Examples of shared goals include increasing the number of new users for a software product or increasing the number of new clients for a service.

2. Track each other’s metrics

It’s also important for each team to have visibility into each other’s metrics. If the sales team is getting fewer leads than they’re used to, they should be able to check current marketing campaign stats to spot the root of the problem.
On the other hand, marketers should be able to see how many of the leads they deliver are closed.

Offer access to these key sales and marketing metrics:

• Number of MQLs
• Number of SQLs
• MQL to SQL conversion rate
• Website traffic volume
• Customer satisfaction ratings (CSAT and/or NPS)

3. Improve proposal content and processes

To win new clients, your proposals should be on brand. When improving alignment, it’s a good idea to give the marketing team visibility into the proposal content that the sales team is sending.

4. Set up regular meetings

There should be a weekly meeting between sales and marketing to go over:

• Shared goals and metrics
• What’s working well
• What needs improvement

5. Create a system for inter-department requests

There are many ways for sales and marketing teams to support each other. Create an Asana or Trello board where anyone can add requests to a “request” or “backlog” column.

6. Consolidate your tech stack and communication

Get everyone on the same page by consolidating your tech stack as much as possible.

7. Pull messaging from the CEO

When disagreements about brand voice or value propositions arise, make sure both teams have access to the CEO for persona refinement and strategic targeting.

8. Set up quarterly shared projects

Sales and marketing teams should work together on shared projects regularly.

9. Structure your organization to foster alignment

Team structure has a big impact on alignment. The chief revenue officer (CRO) is a role that has seen a lot of growth.

10. Troubleshoot problems together

Rather than each team only looking at their own data and projects, your teams will be able to analyze the entire customer journey and find sticking points and major funnel drop-offs.

11. Align other customer-facing and revenue-driving teams

Sales and marketing alignment is critical because it drastically affects revenue. Other teams whose mutual collaboration is essential should also share customer data and insights.

Take control of the proposal process with Proposify

Sales and marketing teams can work together to create on-brand proposal content for sellers to mix and match. Sales leaders gain unprecedented control and visibility into the proposal process, optimize content, track pipeline, and proactively assist big deals.

Get visibility into proposals with Proposify.
Dayana Mayfield is a B2B SaaS copywriter who believes in the power of content marketing. Connect with her on LinkedIn here .