Are your sales Team Activities Aligned with Marketing?
A new kind of marketing and sales strategy is starting to take shape. This innovative approach merges the best features of marketing and sales to produce a versatile framework applicable to any service; this can profoundly impact any Business. This new marketing and sales term is referred to as smarketing.
Possible warning indicators indicating that both teams are not aligned:
- The sales team is complaining that marketing efforts are not bringing enough sales leads
- Sales representatives claim that they lack sufficient sales enablement content.
- Sales representatives are not sharing conversations and feedback from prospects with the marketing team
- The marketing team does not prioritize sales requests.
- Sales and marketing are unaware of each other’s campaign efforts.
- Marketing is not keeping an eye on sales figures to adjust their campaigns accordingly.
How to align sales and marketing?
Maintaining control and ensuring alignment becomes more challenging when sales and marketing teams expand in size. But aligning both teams is crucial to maintain an efficient workflow that drives the correct client base, generates more conversions, and drives more sales.1. Schedule regular meetings between teams:
The first step is to have marketing and sales start attending productive meetings together. Sharing recent insights is a great way to begin your first meeting. A sales representative can share a remarkable moment from a sales conversation. Marketing team members can discuss compelling messaging, campaign themes, and customer research information. Initiating the meeting with a simple exchange of information will ensure its success and create the framework for future collaboration. Whether in person or online, regular meetings enable employees from different departments to get to know one another and can significantly reduce the amount of time spent exchanging emails describing ideas. This makes integrating new employees into the team more accessible and sets the tone for open communication and teamwork from day one.2. Hold regular brainstorming sessions and inter-team conferences:
Meetings with people from both groups help achieve complete alignment. This is especially crucial when collaborating on projects or developing campaigns incorporating innovative marketing strategies that need sales input. Lead managers often contribute valuable ideas and feedback during meetings because of the unique perspective they’ve gained from working directly with prospects and clients. Collaboration during planning and execution increases the likelihood of successful sales and marketing initiatives.3. Plan your content and marketing campaigns to answer buyer personas needs:
Since they initiate contact with customers and discuss their concerns, the sales team know more about their clients than anybody else. With a shared understanding of customer pain areas, customer goals, competitors, etc., the marketing team can stimulate interest and generate leads by prioritizing their efforts based on what the customers genuinely need.4. Share and coordinate content marketing campaign with sales:
Knowing and understanding the marketing strategy, especially after both sides have mutually agreed upon it, is beneficial to sales- Be ready to respond to questions about it.
- Get insights on how the campaign is received at the client’s end.
- Share feedback with the marketing team to help evaluate the campaign’s success.
- Give tips to optimize the campaign