Here’s Why Marketing and Sales MUST Get Along

The gap between marketing and sales teams has been around since the two functions were created and is usually just accepted as an irreparable inconvenience in many businesses.

Sales thinks only they are worried about the quarter VS Marketing thinks they are the only ones who think strategically.

Sales wonder why they have to generate all their own leads VS Marketing complains that sales ignores or criticizes everything they generate.

Sales thinks marketing is lightweight and easy VS Marketing thinks salespeople will say anything to get a deal.

It is time for this fighting to stop.

As the spread of the internet and social media transform the B2B buying process, aligning the different departments has never been more critical to driving revenue and growth.

The lack of alignment between sales and marketing is failing businesses across the globe. So much so, that misalignment is costing businesses more than a trillion dollars per year. That’s right $1 trillion (with 12 zeros).

In fact, sales and marketing misalignment is the number one reason why an organization’s annual revenue stagnates or, worse, declines.

This issue has become such a hot topic that companies have start yo listed what is their marketing priority ahead of understanding marketing ROI and reducing acquisition costs.

If this sounds familiar, then now is the time to address the sales and marketing alignment challenge. Because if you don’t, your business is unlikely to grow any further. So, how do you successfully align both teams? The answer is Blending, works together seamlessly to close more business.

When sales and marketing are combined, it becomes far easier to track results and make high-impact changes with the final goal of increase your customer base.

The evolution of sales and marketing

Gone are old days of the “ABC – always be closing” approach to sales and using cold call “spray and pray” techniques to find new prospects.

Today, sales is part of the wider marketing mix, and the marketing is accountable in sales process.

The reason for this change is because consumer habits have evolved, and the old sales techniques no longer work. Now, much of the purchase process is happening online, as:

92% of buyers start with an information search,
53% of buyers find that going online and researching is superior to interacting with a salesperson,
75% of buyers depend on social networks to learn about choosing the right vendor,
90% of buyers won’t take a cold call.

Due to the introduction of sales automation tools (CRM) and marketing software, you’re now able to collect a wide range of data on prospects making the whole process more data driven. The evolution is more clear if you are checking how the sales funnel, which represents the sales and marketing processes within a business, is evolved.

So the question is: How to align sales and marketing in your business?

There are 8 clear steps in order to do this:

Restructure the customer journey, starting from the awareness stage at the top of the customer journey’s funnel, right down through to the brand loyalty stage, everything should be tied together as an experience.
Develop an agreed target customer persona, in order to get everyone on the same page and be more effective as a joint team, you need to help sales and marketing agree on a customer profile by creating an ideal customer persona document together.
Use a “marketing first” approach, this means that marketers find (or target) potential customers who have a specific problem and show them how it can be solved. It starts with marketing who warm up and nurture new leads by sharing information on the product and selling the features and the benefits.
Measure joint key performance indicators, so your team is uniting under one common goal.
Gather sales feedback. this is one of the most powerful things that you can do after you align both your sales and marketing teams together is to look at the feedback you get directly from your customer also known as Voice of Customer (VOC) data.
Keep marketing messages consistent, In fact, 21% of B2B marketers cite “giving the customer a poor impression of our organization” as one of the most detrimental factors resulting from poor content marketing and sales alignment.

Create marketing-led sales assets. One of the most popular B2B marketing strategies used today is content marketing. When used by both sales and marketing teams, content marketing is highly effective at nurturing prospects through the different stages of the sales funnel.

Work together in post-sale, retention and growth. There’s a lot more to gain from this alignment, especially if the teams work together in order to grow and retain customers. You can generate recurrent sales and not missing on profits you should be making from existing customers.

Conclusion

Blending your sales and marketing team is a fantastic way to grow your business and scale it beyond what a separate sales and marketing team is capable of, in addition by moving sales and marketing into a single department, you’ll be able to uncover unique insights into the sales process, fine-tune and optimize your sales and marketing strategies, as well as grow new business opportunities and increase revenues.

A fully aligned, hybrid sales and marketing team puts your organization in the best position to extract the most value from prospects and customers and this will be a foundation to make sure that you are growing your business.