Is Your Marketing and Sales Aligned?
Ignoring the misalignment between your sales and marketing teams can be costly. In fact, misalignment in sales and marketing is the number one reason why a company's annual revenue stagnates or, worse, decreases.
Failure to align your sales and marketing teams leads to wasted budget and resources. That means that between 60-70% of B2B content is not being used and the majority of leads are not converting into sales.
That's not good news for any business!
So, how can you get your sales and marketing teams to align?
The answer is Smarketing.
What Is Smarketing?
You probably have worked out that Smarketing is a blend of the two words sales and marketing. But, it is so much more than that.
Smarketing is when the sales and marketing teams work in a single department seamlessly to close more business.
What Are The Benefits Of Smarketing?
By combing sales and marketing, it makes it easier to make any necessary changes and track results.
Businesses that have adopted "Smarketing" have seen a significant increase in their sales.
According to Aberdeen Group CMO's Agenda Report, successfully aligning your sales and marketing means you can:
- Retain 36% more customers
- Generate 32% more in revenue
- Obtain 38% higher win rates
Furthermore, other research found that companies that have aligned their sales and marketing achieved 24% faster growth. Consequently, this leads to a 27% faster profit growth in a one year period.
That is pretty impressive, right?
So, how do you check whether or not your company's sales and marketing are aligned?
Well, here are some tell-tale signs to look out for...
No Accountability
The sales team might be focusing too much on poor leads in order to meet the numbers. As a result, this can lead to customer service issues that impact the profits of your company.
Then the blame game starts between sales and marketing. "You don't follow up on leads" or "You don't give me the right leads" are common blame game examples.
What to do: hold the sales and marketing team to the same standard and have them meet the same expectations. Whether it's sales, customer service or revenue, put them all on the same number.
Poor Communication
It is not unheard of if the marketing team has little knowledge about the sales process. Quite often, they do not know about the efforts that go into acquiring and nurturing a lead, and vice versa.
This leads to a break-down in communication.
What to do: sales and marketing need to hold regular meetings.
By having regular meetings, plans can be put in place to support the sales process, goals and metrics established, issues are discussed, solutions are developed, strategies are set, and results can be reviewed.
Integrate Softwares
When each department works on different software, it affects the communication and productivity of sales and marketing.
What to do: in order to establish seamless communication, maintaining a central customer database is vital. A CRM that can integrate your sales and marketing will allow the sales team to see the latest interaction on a lead, while the marketing team can keep an eye on the customer's journey. Having one centralised system will eliminate any miscommunication and keep work flowing steadily.
Generic Content and Messaging
When your marketing team create generic content and messaging, you don't stand out from the competition.
That means that your sales team end up sounding like every other company and lose deals as a result.
What to do: sales and marketing should work together to establish terminology and content that will keep them in sync but also give your company a competitive edge. Develop marketing materials that will help the sales team convey the message correctly.
Different Training
If your sales team enjoy the privileges of motivational talks, team building activities, attend events and get product training while your marketing team get product demos, industry insights and simple instructions.
They end up on completely different pages.
What to do: get them to train, learn and build together. Send them to the same conferences and meetings so they stay aligned.
The Bottom Line
The hybrid of smarketing puts your company in a position to extract the most value from your customers, make full use of your budget and take full advantage of resources.
As sales and marketing are pivotal to your business, building a strong connection between the two is absolutely paramount.
Smarketing is much more than just a cool word. It is an entirely new way of thinking.
So, if you want to take your business to brand new heights and start to see an increase in revenue - it's time to get your smarketing in place.
