5 Benefits of Aligning Your Marketing and Sales Teams
Sales and marketing misalignment is extremely common, and companies with divided sales and marketing teams that function separately are putting themselves at a disadvantage. Ultimately, both marketing and sales teams have the same goal of driving sales and revenue, so it is crucial to keep them aligned and in sync. Sales and marketing alignment is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance, when marketing and sales teams unite around a single revenue cycle, they dramatically improve marketing return on investment (ROI), sales productivity, and, most importantly, growth.
In fact, study after study shows the benefits of sales and marketing alignment on ROI. The Demand Gen 2019 B2B Buyers Survey Report found that when teams are aligned, companies see an average of 19% faster revenue growth and 15% profitability. LinkedIn’s research found even more benefits with strongly aligned teams: they’re 67% more effective at closing deals, 58% more effective at retaining customers and drive 208% more revenue as a result of their marketing efforts. (Only if there is room)
The silos between sales and marketing departments are a long-standing issue throughout almost every industry. The problem with misaligned sales and marketing teams is the inefficient processes that arise, ultimately wasting time creating content without a clear objective. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute reports that 60 to 70% of B2B content is never used because the subject topics are irrelevant to the buyer audience. Meanwhile, 79% of marketing leads never convert due to a failure to nurture consumer connections (HubSpot). When sales and marketing teams are aligned, it normally means that the company is market-orientated, a company culture in which all employees are committed to the continuous creation of superior value for customers but what other benefits can businesses achieve when aligning sales and marketing teams?
1. Accurate Buyer Personas
In organisations where sales and marketing aren't properly aligned, only 15% of companies collaborate on buyer personas. Contrast this with highly aligned companies, where 58% work together on buyer personas, according to CMI and LinkedIn research: Content Marketing: Unlocking Sales and Marketing Performance, 2018.
The Marketing team is typically responsible for creating buyer personas and are usually generated through research with client interviews and focus groups alongside insights from their website and social media data. However, it's sales that have daily conversations with prospects, leads and customers. When put together, if a marketer has done their research correctly, the sales team should be able to identify their client or customer from the buyer personas.
Sales teams understand which pain points and goals are most pressing right now to their prospects, leads and clients, what information their customers need to know to help not only convert but generate interest to convert to a lead. However, marketing teams can see what content buyers consume, when and by whom. With the right software, they can even see the IP addresses of those with high lead scores, meaning marketing can help identify better-fit target customers. By combining both teams' insights, you can gain a much better understanding of your ideal customers and create precisely accurate personas.
A huge benefit of sales and marketing working together means that marketing can help generate content that will capture the audience the sales team are chasing. By understanding customers better and having accurate buyer personas, both sales and marketing will have shared ownership and can help deliver a better and smoother buying experience.
2. Stay Ahead of the Competition
A lot of marketing teams take time out to analyse what the competition is doing, from website changes, social media updates and blog posts they know what the trends are and where they stand in comparison.
By working together, your marketing team can keep your sales team informed of the tactics being used and the positioning of the competition. This allows your sales team to properly address why your products or services are far superior to the competition when they speak to prospects.
Download our infographic!
Fill out the below form to receive our infographic on our 5 Benefits of Aligning Your Sales and Marketing Teams!
3. Increase Revenue
When sales and marketing align, revenue increases, the sales cycle shortens, and conversion rates improve along with forecast accuracy. This issue has become such a hot topic that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies with more than 200 employees have listed it as their third biggest marketing priority – ahead of understanding marketing ROI and reducing acquisition costs.
HubSpot has reported that misalignment between both sales and marketing teams costs a staggering $1 trillion a year. That’s primarily down to 79 per cent of leads never converting into sales because of a lack of nurturing. Of the leads that do get passed to sales teams, though, 73 per cent of them are never contacted.
At the same time, they have also found that organisations with excellent sales and marketing alignment close 38 per cent more deals and achieve 27 per cent faster three-year profit growth. They also achieve 208 per cent higher revenue than organisations with disconnected marketing and sales teams.
According to their CMO's Agenda report, Aberdeen Group found that by successfully aligning sales and marketing, you can:
Generate 32% higher revenue
Retain 36% more customers
Achieve 38% higher win rates
The research also found that high alignment generates higher brand awareness and average deal size. Failure to align sales and marketing teams is leading to wasted budget and resources as up to 60-70% of B2B content is not being used and close to 75% of marketing leads never convert into a sale.
Furthermore, Sirius Decisions found that companies that align sales and marketing teams achieve 24% faster growth rates and 27% faster profit growth over a year period.
4. Generate Conversions By Connecting Faster With Qualified Leads
How quickly sales respond to leads has a significant impact on their ability to convert them. By agreeing on which leads to focus on in order of their perceived opportunity value, sales can turn their attention to higher-quality leads and reduce the lead response time. Meanwhile, marketing can focus their efforts on generating the right leads and nurturing the best prospects.
In aligned organisations, both sales and marketing work together to determine which attributes make up their ideal customer profile - the ones most likely to convert, bring in the most revenue and become loyal customers.
5. Create A More Well-Defined Strategy
Businesses with aligned sales and marketing functions tend to be strategic and big-picture oriented. By planning for, promoting, and enabling alignment, the company amplifies the impact of both marketing and sales activities. When sales and marketing rally around a big-picture view of how to generate revenue, they can work together to form and launch campaigns aimed at achieving that goal. Then, they can harness the wealth of insights and efficiencies yielded by this alignment to further refine and improve a high-level business strategy for growth.
#SpeaktoSleek
When planning an event in order to achieve your goals and ROI in your event, combining the objectives of both the sales and marketing teams will allow you to build an event that achieves this. Sleek works closely with different teams within your organisation when planning your event to help achieve your objectives, our Event Consultancy service can help align the vision of both teams when starting to help this process.