Sales and marketing have traditionally been rivals to a certain extent, in part because there’s a certain amount of overlap between their roles. They’re working towards similar goals but using different means to get there, and that can lead to a certain amount of tension within your B2B. If you want to achieve the best results possible, your sales and marketing teams need to be working in alignment.hat helps it to drum up more business and to find new clients.
This means that instead of treating them as two separate silos, they need to work together. Physical proximity is important, because if you want the two teams to work side by side then it helps if people get to know each other. Some larger companies have sales and marketing teams in different buildings – and often even in different regions or countries. It’s no wonder that they’re not as aligned as they could be.
If you want to encourage true alignment between your sales and marketing teams, they need to be working towards a common set of goals and measured by the same KPIs. You’ll also want to use a powerful CRM system so that both sales and marketing can track activity. Lead generation doesn’t start and end on a website, and so marketing teams will need to work closely with sales team to understand what’s happening to those leads after they fill out a data capture form.
End-to-end tracking
Sales teams and marketing teams both have a habit of placing too much emphasis on lead generation and creating new customers without worrying about existing ones. Existing customers can be a valuable source of new leads through word of mouth, but they can also be targeted for upselling and other sales and marketing initiatives.
Sales teams need to think more like marketers and marketers need to think more like sales teams. Together, they can identify clever ways to improve the quality of lead generation efforts and to boost the overall conversion rate by streamlining the whole process and increasing the relevancy of messaging.
This is where we start to see the true power of sales and marketing alignment. It allows you to more accurately track the entire user journey and to make changes in real-time, monitoring the results and adjusting your strategy accordingly. For example, you might make a change that brings in fewer leads and which ordinarily your marketing team would have scrapped. If your sales and marketing teams are aligned, though, you might learn that even though there are fewer leads, they’re much more likely to convert into a paying customer.
Conclusion
For us, working towards sales and marketing alignment is a no-brainer. After all, it’s common sense that the more integrated your company is, the more effective it will be. Aligning sales and marketing is like aligning manufacturing with distribution. It’s not necessary to run a business, perhaps, but it is if you want to make a lot of money. It’s just something you’ll need to keep working on.
Struggling with lead gen? Don’t worry – we’re here to help you to gather the leads you need to boost your business. Request a demo of Bant.io to find out how we can help your company to grow by sending hot B2B leads directly to your inbox. You won’t regret it.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.