A guest blog written in collaboration with a 2Swell partner: CloudTask

 

Highly aligned sales and marketing teams achieve 32% greater year-on-year growth*.

Every stat you look at when it comes to this topic demonstrates the advantages, yet few organizations ever achieve true ‘smarketing’ alignment.

Furthermore, countless blogs focus on how to improve email open rates, or the perfect cold calling approach, but when it comes to alignment, such a crucial part of business success, it often misses the limelight.

Here we offer our stand out tips to synchronize sales and marketing, and some of the results you will see once this happens:

 

1. Align Goals and Expectations

The goal of sales and marketing is to increase profit and revenue. However, the expectations on which this is achieved often differ. For example, in a study by Demand Gen, 55% of sales people stated they wanted a higher quality of leads from marketing, whilst 34% of marketing teams were interested in better lead follow up.

This is where misalignment can begin. Step one is to agree the goals and expectations. Something which sounds simple, but is regularly missed.

Sit down in a meeting at least once a quarter, and map out exactly what you want to achieve and who is responsible for what. This way there will be no confusion on the objectives and you can both move forward in peace knowing they are agreed and understood.

Afterall, agreeing KPIs is essential.

 

2. Coordinate, Create and Share

Past just agreeing the goals and expectations, it’s crucial to coordinate, co-create and share your processes, ideas, campaigns and challenges. Everyone can bounce off each other to create new drive and energy.

As a high level example, both marketing and sales run campaigns to promote new content, products, offers, and more. The more coordination and co-creation that occurs throughout these campaigns, the greater the chance of success.

At CloudTask, all our large campaigns are co-created in advance and we have an interactive calendar showing exactly when they go live, which includes a background summary. As soon as they go live, a notification goes out to everyone involved, further detailing the goals, the buyer personas targeted and stage of the buyer’s journey it’s aimed at. Furthermore, the next steps are highlighted, so everyone who has a role to play knows exactly what to do.

This is just one example of hundreds we can share where collaboration has benefited everyone. Arrange regular calls and meetings, have a common communication platform, and keep everyone up to date. If challenges arise, these can be shared too.

 

3. Work from an Integrated Tech Platform

When both teams work from an integrated platform such as HubSpot, life just becomes that little bit easier.

These platforms can be set up to track, monitor and measure every detail you have for a contact, what they have interacted with and at what stage of the buyer’s journey they are at. When either team reaches out to them, things can be easily tailored and targeted.   

Furthermore, dashboards can be set-up to view any data you want to see and are able to measure, ranging from the number of organic leads marketing generates, to the % of leads sales closes. With this closed loop reporting, both teams know exactly what’s going on.

No more blame games, just a better mutual understanding of processes and results.

 

4. What About the Product?

You can only work with the quality of the product you have. Even if you have the best teams in the world, if the product isn’t good, eventually it will fail. Therefore taking alignment to another level, is it possible for sales, marketing and product development to become one?

Clearly the more aligned your whole organization is the better, but product development is a team you can really become partners with to accelerate success.

Growth hacking has become the word of the moment. In its simplest terms, it’s something which occurs when you find the perfect fit for your product on the market. When sales becomes closely aligned with product development they can both help to create a product that finds that fit. Marketing can work in this process to develop innovative new ways to create interest and leads from the developments that are occuring.

Admittedly, we could write a blog post on this itself, but it’s something that needs to be considered if you haven’t already.

 

5.  The Extra Details & Communication

The above are four steps we’ve identified to bring sales and marketing closer to success but it doesn’t stop there. From agreeing service level agreements (SLAs) on what each team will deliver, to documenting the specific language and acronyms everyone uses, the list could go on.

The key ingredient is great communication. From here, at the end of the year, one thing will be for sure:

 

Your Profit & Revenue Will Rise

The benefits are well worth the time and effort. Sales and Marketing Alignment:

With all this in mind, how could you better align your teams?


Discover The Secret to Training Sales Reps to Set Up Qualified Appointments - Download CloudTask’s Free Guide

 

 

 

*(source: Internal Results Ltd.).