How to end the war between sales and marketing
Does your sales team chase low-margin easy quota wins while your marketing targets high-yield customers? Are you struggling to achieve your business objectives with your sales and marketing working at cross purposes? It might be time to look at how to get your teams working together.
Sales and marketing alignment is vital for success in today’s fast-paced business world. When your teams communicate and coordinate their efforts, they’re suddenly able to focus on the most valuable opportunities, increase revenue, and even drive down costs.
Building a Collaborative Team
To build a culture of collaboration, it’s essential to start by determining your commercial objectives. This means looking at your competition and figuring out where your company fits in the market. You’ll also need to think about what kind of company you want to be and how you can achieve your goals. With a SMARTIE framework, you can establish Specific, Measurable, Accepted, Realistic, Real-time, Individual, and scalablE goals that bring your sales and marketing teams’ efforts into line.
Bridging the Sales and Marketing Gap
But it’s not just about setting objectives. Research shows that 9 out of 10 sales and marketing professionals are misaligned in strategy, process, content, and culture. To bridge this gap, it’s important to take practical action across the organisation. This can include measuring unified strategies, using the same processes and systems, creating and reviewing content together, and building a shared culture.
Defining your Marketing Plan
Marketing is essential for creating awareness, building your brand, differentiating from competitors, gaining customer insights, and ensuring consistency in messaging and tactics. A successful marketing plan should define your target audience, develop clear messaging, and create a distinct brand position. Bringing sales into the planning stages of your marketing and developing a comprehensive marketing plan together can improve customer trust, drive growth, and achieve long-term success.
Choosing your Marketing Strategies
When it comes to digital marketing options, the possibilities are endless. You can use advertising, content marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, paid search, programmatic advertising, reputation marketing, SEO, social media marketing, video marketing, web analytics, and webinars to connect with customers and prospects. Your research will tell you what works best for your product or service and your target audience. Just make sure your sales team stays in the loop – their customer insights could be invaluable.
Personalising Sales and Marketing
If you’re looking for a more personalised approach, social selling and event marketing may be the way to go. Social selling involves making meaningful connections with prospects on social media, while event marketing uses live events to build trusted relationships with clients and collect valuable feedback.
Take the personal approach one step further with account-based marketing and sales (ABM&S). Ideal for low volume high return sectors, you’ll want sales and marketing working hand in hand with this approach.
Building on your Success
Finally, refining your marketing based on metrics is crucial for making data-driven decisions. By tracking key metrics such as conversion rate, lead generation, customer acquisition cost, ROI, and website traffic, you can identify areas for improvement and adjust your sales and marketing efforts accordingly.
Overall, sales and marketing alignment is crucial for achieving your business objectives. By building a collaboration culture and aligning your sales and marketing efforts with commercial goals, you can drive growth and achieve long-term success.
Are you ready to take a giant leap forward with your marketing?
If you’re ready to build your dream marketing team, and take a giant leap forward in the way you market and scale your business, then please get in touch for an informal chat on how we can help you achieve your aspirations for your business.