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:

1. The sales team is complaining that marketing efforts are not bringing enough sales leads
2. Sales representatives claim that they lack sufficient sales enablement content.
3. Sales representatives are not sharing conversations and feedback from prospects with the marketing team
4. The marketing team does not prioritize sales requests.
5. Sales and marketing are unaware of each other’s campaign efforts.
6. 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

1. Be ready to respond to questions about it.
2. Get insights on how the campaign is received at the client’s end.
3. Share feedback with the marketing team to help evaluate the campaign’s success.
4. Give tips to optimize the campaign

5. Define and share KPI and ROI metrics:

Determine the key performance indicators that will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the current marketing strategy. This may be tracked by the number of inquiries the sales team receives. At the same time, the marketing department can evaluate its effectiveness by looking at the channels it utilizes to promote specific campaigns. Examples of such metrics include the volume of visitors to your website, the percentage of emails opened, the number of people who signed up for your newsletter, the frequency with which you receive phone calls or text messages, etc.

6. Eliminate the communication gap between sales and marketing:

To close the loop, both sides must exchange feedback. The feedback loop between sales and marketing must be strengthened. Before sending any communications, the sales team must run their ideas with the marketing team. The marketing team must seek sales input while generating campaign concepts.

Aligning Sales and Strategy: Pro Tips

The first step in launching successful smarketing campaigns is constantly synchronizing the business’s sales and marketing functions. We must figure out how to move from individual departments to working together toward common goals. Here are some suggestions for improving your smarketing alignment that should help.

1. Learn lessons from setbacks:

Integrating sales and marketing efforts take time. As a result, there might be some initial failure with your marketing efforts. Customers may not respond as expected, and conversions may not materialize, despite the best efforts. Rather than seeing these setbacks as failures, successful smarketing teams see them as opportunities to learn and grow. Sales and marketing can create a common goal for success by evaluating past efforts and discussing areas for future growth.

2. Think about the big picture as well as the details:

Smarketing success depends on both short-term and long-term objectives. What’s the catch? While marketers tend to focus on the immediate results of campaigns, salespeople are more concerned with the long-term value of repeat business. For smarketing to be successful, both parties need to compromise.

3. Know the need of the customer and what they want:

What are your client’s needs? Each sales and marketing team has a unique perspective on this question; while marketing may understand what attracts customers, sales have the experience to convert interest into investment. Together, smarketing teams can gain a more profound knowledge of the ideal customer experience.

4. Identify target segments:

To maximize the effectiveness of combined efforts, the sales and marketing departments must define critical target segments. By identifying a shared consumer profile with the highest likelihood of a positive response, smarketing teams can collaborate to develop the optimal strategy. Aligning your sales and marketing teams facilitates the achievement of both teams’ objectives and increases corporate income. By incorporating these sales and marketing best practices into your smarketing plan, your conversion rate, revenue, and client retention will increase exponentially. Are you prepared to implement one of the most innovative breakthroughs in the sales and marketing sector in recent years? Beedesign is the company to contact if you need a growth strategy consultation in Bahrain.