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Every company depends on multiple factors for producing the profits they need. Depending on the size of your organization, there may be any number of departments at work for this purpose. Two industry-indiscriminate elements are sales and marketing. If these two teams aren’t working in concert with one another, you might as well be throwing huge chunks of your budget out the window. And if they are, you have a in your grasp a magicalsynergy referred to as "Smarketing."
Assess Where Things Are At
Before we get into the steps every company can use to align their sales and marketing teams, you should do an assessment of where things are with your teams. It’s no secret that sales and marketing don’t always get along, so you may have to resolve any current problems.
It could also be that in the past, firm goals weren’t communicated to the teams, or that objectives differed in some way between the two. Whatever the case, now is the time to tackle these challenges.
Encourage Open Communication
Open communication is a must if your alignment attempts are going to be successful. Make it clear that this is a priority for your company. Let both teams know of the communication expectations. It should be seen as just as important as any other goal they have.
Constant feedback is essential. Your sales team should be meeting with your marketers regularly to talk about the quality of the leads they are receiving. If your marketing team isn’t bringing in leads that are ready to be sold to, your sales team will be wasting their time.
Treat Them as One Team
To a certain degree, it makes sense to keep sales and marketing teams separate. They’re doing different types of work, after all. However, the last thing you want is for members from either team to look at the other as an enemy. Going off the above advice, you don’t want marketers to feel like they’re being punished because your salespeople can’t close.
Get these two teams to understand they’re fighting the same battle. Provide incentives to both teams when one hits certain milestones, as this will get the point across that the opposite is true: if one team drops the ball, both will suffer.
Utilize Analytics
Sales is generally thought to be pretty straightforward. Did they make their quotas or not? In this digital age, it isn’t necessarily that simple. You need software that can help you track your sales funnel so you know where things can be improved.
The same goes for marketing. Analytics can help show you where your marketing strategies are working and where they’re not.
With analytics, you have objective measurements for every goal. Neither team can claim you’re playing favorites or are blind to the reality of what they do because you have concrete numbers spelling out exactly what is going on.
Use Software
Along the same lines, there is now very powerful sales and marketing software available that you can use to get the best out of both teams. These platforms almost always involve some form of analytics, though it’s important you get the best kind you can afford.
Aside from reporting, sales and marketing software will also help propel the progress of integrating the two teams. It will give them a common place to communicate—often in a manner that makes these messages available to everyone involved—and track performance. This kind of open approach will also make it easier for team members to speak up about ways they think the company could improve.
When your sales and marketing teams are on the same page, the sky’s the limit. With the above keys to aligning the two, you’re on the path to better results than ever before.
