4 Steps for Accelerating Sales and Marketing Alignment

In the race for business success, strategic alignment between sales and marketing teams is the key to outperforming the competition. Harnessing their competitive energies toward a shared goal requires understanding the stats and the practical steps for dream team performance. 

1. A study by the Aberdeen Group reveals that by revving up the growth engine, aligned organizations accelerate with an impressive 32% annual revenue growth, leaving misaligned competitors in the dust.
2. Aligned sales and marketing teams generate 208% more revenue from marketing efforts alone. This turbocharged synergy ensures that every marketing initiative is strategically aligned with the business and sales team's objectives, delivering unparalleled results.
3. Aligning sales and marketing teams leads to a substantial 36% increase in customer retention rates, according to MarketingProfs. This statistic underscores the profound impact of unified messaging and consistent brand experiences throughout the customer journey.
4. In the race for closing deals, aligned sales and marketing teams have the pole position with a remarkable 38% higher sales win rate. Their synchronized approach ensures they take the checkered flag by presenting a cohesive value proposition.
5. Aligned teams enjoy an extraordinary 36% increase in customer satisfaction, demonstrating their ability to deliver an exceptional customer experience at every turn. By leveraging shared insights and providing a seamless experience, these aligned teams create loyal customers who become brand advocates.
   

It's easy to see that SMARKETING (that's sales and marketing combined 🤓) positively impacts businesses in many ways. Now let's look at four practical steps to get these teams in tip-top condition to compete:

1. Collaboration in the Pit Stops: Foster collaboration between sales and marketing teams to deliver a seamless brand message and achieve higher conversion rates.

• Establish regular communication channels and encourage cross-departmental meetings to share insights, challenges, and successes. Whether it's Teams or Slack, ensure your team is active in the chat. That means you must also be engaged in the channels if you're a functional or business leader. This really comes down to company culture. Is your's one of collaboration, idea exchange, and trust?
• Implement shared project management tools and collaboration platforms to facilitate information exchange and streamline workflows. Subscribe to our blog, and we will discuss the MarTech and SalesTech stacks that are based in 2023. 
• Measure the impact of collaboration through metrics such as increased lead-to-customer conversion rates, higher customer satisfaction scores, and improved brand consistency across touch points.
  

2. Embracing the Track's Curves: Adapt your strategies based on customer insights and preferences to foster long-term loyalty.

• Encourage joint brainstorming sessions between sales and marketing teams to align messaging and campaign strategies with customer needs. This may be a win-loss report for large projects or a monthly touch base to discuss market and customer trends.  
• Understand the customer journey from beginning to end. That means sales must understand top-of-funnel activities, and marketing must know what it takes to close business. This may take sessions designed to educate employees or take on the look of an onboarding training module. 
• Monitor metrics such as customer retention rates, lifetime value, and customer feedback scores to gauge the effectiveness of the aligned strategies.

3. Accelerating Towards the Finish Line: Optimize lead generation and conversion processes through synchronized efforts and targeted strategies.

• Implement lead scoring mechanisms to identify high-quality leads and improve the marketing and sales handoff process. Do you have the correct organization to support this type of lead qualification? This may be your inside sales organization. How can they feel empowered to work with field sales and marketing teams to more deeply qualify leads?
• Provide sales teams with in-depth knowledge of marketing campaigns, enabling them to effectively follow up on leads. Using the communication channels and tech stack above can support this. Also, empower your functional leaders to present their plans quarterly. 
• Measure the impact of alignment on revenue growth, conversion rates, and sales pipeline velocity to assess the success of your efforts.
  

4. Navigating the Race Track with Precision: Make data-driven decisions by leveraging insights from both sales and marketing teams.

• Establish regular data-sharing protocols between sales and marketing teams to exchange market research, customer analytics, and campaign performance data. Ensure your teams aren't working in silos and report on overlapping metrics such as new pipeline generated and inbounds/inbound ratios. 
• Utilize analytics tools to measure the impact of marketing campaigns on sales outcomes and vice versa. What is your Cost per Acquisition (CPA)? Lifetime Customer Value (LCV)?
• Evaluate your reporting regularly to ensure you genuinely see the business. Refrain from getting stuck in the monotony of reporting for the sake of reporting. The numbers don't lie, but they may only tell part of the story if you look at them objectively and regularly.  

The numbers are clear—aligned sales and marketing teams drive remarkable results. But achieving true alignment goes beyond statistics; it requires building a collaborative culture that champions synergy. By embracing a culture of collaboration, your organization can unlock the full potential of SMARKETING and accelerate toward exceptional business success.

Contact Tru Marketing today to learn how our expert team can help you build a winning strategy, align your sales and marketing functions, and cultivate a culture of collaboration that drives measurable growth.