Aligning Marketing and Sales for Better Revenue Generation
Imagine a football team where the quarterback passes the ball without knowing where the receivers will be. While it may sound ridiculous, this is how many B2B businesses operate when their marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned. When marketing and sales operate independently, it leads to missed opportunities, wasted resources, and a decline in revenue. When sales and marketing teams work collaboratively and cohesively, they score big and the entire company wins.
In this blog, we’ll make the case for aligning marketing and sales for revenue generation, having sales and marketing cross-collaborate for enhanced personas and buyer journeys, and explain key areas for alignment.
Theory vs Practice: The Reality of Sales and Marketing Alignment
In the perfect world, each of your employees is dedicated to enhancing the company and driving business growth. But the world is not perfect, and neither is any company. The reality is that the company is made of individuals who, as professional, talented, and committed as they may be, each has their own work priorities. For the viability of a B2B company, it’s necessary to ensure every individual understands and is aligned on the company’s goals and their role in achieving them.
Since removing friction in the buying process is essential for streamlining revenue generation, an integral first step is to align marketing and sales teams on a common goal. Establishing alignment is a complex challenge that requires a comprehensive approach. While people throughout your organization may generally work toward a common goal, each individual and team within it has their own goals, it’s important to delineate their contribution to aligned revenue generation goals.
You may have a high-functioning marketing department that makes compelling materials that generate leads and a sales team that’s highly motivated and knows how to close deals, so alignment isn’t your top priority. While it may be a complex process, businesses who align sales and marketing successfully unlock a powerhouse for revenue. According to HubSpot, organizations with good alignment close 38% more deals. More specifically, businesses that effectively align sales and marketing can achieve 208% higher marketing revenue than organizations without alignment.
Enhancing Personas and Buyer Journeys
Knowing that alignment is important yet complex to implement, it’s vital to establish a common understanding of your customer personas and their buyer journeys. Your marketing department may develop materials and content utilizing buyer personas that describe your typical buyers, their business priorities, and their considerations. With the input of your sales department, personas should be rounded out with feedback from real clients, objections from deals that didn’t close, and highlights of any new findings. Together, they have the ability to develop more authentic personas.
The buyer journey is another critical area to form alignment. Similar to personas, marketing departments often have a well-crafted buyer journey and their perspective on the types of content to create to appeal to a lead in the Awareness phase, which types of materials are ideal for informing the lead in the Education phase, and the integral information that a lead and their stakeholders need for the Decision phase. A sales team’s first-hand experience with leads and clients gives them a value perspective of which phases have the most challenges and where they find people could be better educated. Together, marketing and sales can establish a much more realistic buyer journey that provides direction for developing content.
Developing buyer personas and buyer journeys through a joint effort between marketing and sales lays the foundation for improving revenue generation. To ensure marketing and sales stay aligned, it’s necessary to build structures that maintain communication between both departments.
How to Keep Marketing and Sales Aligned for Revenue Generation
Part of the comprehensive approach to aligning marketing and sales for revenue generation, is making sure these teams stay productively communicating. To do this, eliminate and prevent silos that isolate teams. Four key areas to focus:
Data
Transparency into how marketing and sales tactics are measured provides clarity to both teams. Most B2B companies have a tech stack that automates outreach, and the marketing team stays apprised of metrics such as email open rates, click through rates, and bouncebacks. Those same companies may have a sales team that uses a CRM system to track leads as they move through the sales funnel. But if they are using separate, homegrown, or legacy systems, they have inadvertently built information silos for their teams. By using a comprehensive marketing automation and CRM platform like HubSpot, everyone has visibility into valuable performance metrics and can stay aligned on progress toward goals.
Meetings
It may seem like the most elementary method, and that’s because…it is! One of the most basic elements of keeping sales and marketing departments aligned is to consistently have productive meetings. Here’s a suggestion for meetings to hold:
- Weekly standing meetings to provide departmental updates and discuss any priority issues.
- Monthly meetings to review performance metrics, understand the analytics, and upcoming initiatives.
- Quarterly presentations between departments to educate each other on campaigns, tactics, and initiatives.
- Annual or semi-annual ‘smarketing’ meetings to collaborate on updates to products, personas, and buyer journeys.
Agility
The ability for marketing and sales to respond to each other’s needs helps close deals. While a marketing department can have their entire quarter of content production planned, it’s imperative they listen to the sales team to understand where content gaps exist. Sales reps can provide marketing with insights on what content is most appreciated by leads and which content misses the mark. When sales needs help closing a deal, marketing needs the flexibility to create the content that will get the buy-in from decision makers. With consistent feedback from sales, marketing can refine their content to drive more leads through the sales funnel.
Accountability
The best way to reduce friction between internal teams is to prevent the most common arguments between them. Often in B2B, marketers believe sales reps don’t capitalize on their leads when they fail to convert, and sales teams want better leads from marketers. To avoid playing the blame game, establish a service level agreement (SLA) between the teams. An SLA between your sales and marketing departments clarifies the responsibilities, expectations, and goals of each department, outlining goals for traffic and leads for marketing, identifying where and how a lead is handed off from marketing to sales, and required contingencies in the event either department doesn’t meet their goals.
Conclusion
Amidst daily operations, meeting production deadlines, and working to close deals, it can seem like a herculean task to properly align sales and marketing managers or team leads. Careful consideration, orchestration, and integration is necessary to effectively align marketing and sales for streamlined revenue generation. Working with professionals who have experience implementing the marketing tech stack and performing the operations that align sales and marketing can shorten your timeline to streamline. While the initial lift may be heavy, the results on revenue generation potential can be exponential.
At AAC, from our experience implementing comprehensive CRM solutions like HubSpot to developing the content needed to fill gaps in sales funnels, we help B2B companies enhance marketing and sales systems to streamline revenue generation.
