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This article will explain what sales and marketing alignment is, explain the benefits of sales and marketing alignment, and provide best practices to help more fully align your sales and marketing departments.
Sales and marketing alignment is the process of having the two departments as fully integrated as possible. Alignment helps them to know and understand what they have in common, what the differences are and what they need to provide to the other department to ensure a productive relationship. Indicators of sales and marketing alignment include:
Everyone knows that the sales and marketing departments fulfill fundamentally different roles within a business. Sales sells the company’s products and services, while marketing produces the content and materials that enables the sale. Both are customer-facing (sales more directly than marketing) and both are essential to the success of the business.
However, due to the silos that exist within most businesses, sales and marketing departments, instead of being tightly aligned and engaged, are often far apart and do not communicate or interact on a regular basis. This can lead to inefficiencies in both departments, which in turn can translate into lost opportunities and lost revenue.
In reality though, sales and marketing are actually two sides of the same coin. In many companies, both departments roll up to the same senior executive, who has a vested interest in ensuring both departments perform to the best of their abilities. Both departments have responsibility for driving sales. Both have goals to increase the size of the customer base. Both interact with customers. All of which ultimately helps generate revenue for the company. The main difference between the two departments then is in how they accomplish their respective tasks.
Breaking through the silos helps both departments become more productive and efficient, which in turns helps the business. In fact, a recent report by the Aberdeen Group1 indicates that businesses that have adopted sales and marketing alignment best practices see significant increases in attainment of sales quotas (38%) and YoY corporate revenue (13.1%) over those that do not.
That is why your sales and marketing departments need to be in alignment.
While sales and marketing alignment may seem difficult to accomplish, and is often time consuming at first, there really is no secret. It is basically a matter of reaching across the table and establishing communications between the two departments.
Once communication is established, engagement, interaction and understanding will follow.
The following list of best practices (by category) provides simple guidelines to begin the alignment process, or help ensure that any alignment you currently have continues to strengthen and grow. Depending on your situation, these guidelines can be used individually or combined into a larger, more structured process.
COMMUNICATION
CUSTOMER INSIGHT
GOALS, OBJECTIVES, METRICS, PROCESSES
MARKETING ACTIVITIES AND CAMPAIGN PLANNING
SALES ACCOUNT PLANNING AND ACTIVITIES
As sales and marketing alignment increases, numerous benefits will begin to accrue, including:
While sales and marketing alignment may initially be time consuming to implement, in the long run it is truly the secret to increased revenue.
Note 1 – The Aberdeen Group, Research Brief, Sales and Marketing Alignment: A Primer on Successful Collaboration, March 2014
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