Effectively aligning your sales and marketing impacts your business in a good way; it grows faster, you close better, and you keep more customers. When we speak to sales and marketing managers, this failure to align is usually the topic of conversation, with each pointing fingers at the other.

The question now is how to remedy this kind of situation? Can you really align a sales and marketing team? Are there any practical steps to do this?

Here are some ideas we came up with from our own dealings with clients:

1. Determine Functional Communications

Determine goals (both common and shared), such as growth and revenue targets. You may even want to introduce incentives for both sales and marketing teams in achieving these goals. Both teams need to communicate well, at all levels. Communication cannot be limited to the department heads. It might even be helpful to make sure they’re physically close to each other in the office.

Schedule weekly meetings to openly discuss initiatives of both teams, and what is and isn’t working. Make sure that they focus on constructive behaviours (ie. openness, honesty) instead of destructive behaviours (ie. defensiveness). Agree on how you define a sales qualified lead and a marketing qualified lead, trying to analyse trends with objective data sources rather than intuition-based opinions.

2. Set up Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Make sure both sides understand your funnel metrics from beginning to end. Does each team member know how many leads are needed at the top of the funnel through each of the buyer stages, to get the number of final customers?

A mutual understanding is key in aligning sales and marketing. Everyone has to be on the same page. Funnel metrics should be used to create service level agreements between sales and marketing.

Define:

  • how many leads are required per time period from marketing to sales
  • what quality of leads are required per time period from marketing to sales
  • how quickly and how often sales will follow up a sales qualified lead

The next step is then to ensure there’s a mutual understanding of the amount of work and commitment required by both teams, based on the funnel metrics.

3. Grade and Filter Leads

You should have some sort of analytics tool in place that tells you what each lead did on your site. Use this data to score and segment your leads. You can do this according to demographics (size, job role, etc) and behaviours (a lead who downloaded an article as opposed to requested a demo).

It’s important to know how your marketing efforts affected their activity on your site. There are plenty of automated marketing software options out there to help you with this. It’s not too pricey and it really is a must-do.

4. Expand your Top of Funnel

Adding as many leads as possible at the top of the funnel never goes against your marketing strategy, even though you don’t necessarily need it at the moment. After all, would you rather stand still or grow?

To do this:

  • Publish quality content, often. Don’t get lazy and let it fall off the table. Content marketing is not a sprint, it’s a marathon; it’s all about momentum! Today’s marketers are often described as publishers rather than advertisers, and we agree.
  • Quality-check your content, again! Is what you’re saying really valuable to your target audience? Will it educate them? Will it speak to their challenges? If the answer is no, then maybe you don’t truly get the issues your audience is facing.

As long as you have your lead scoring and segmenting down, increasing your top of funnel leads won’t be an issue.

5. Recycle Your Leaky Leads

All funnels leak – which is why you need an official recycling tactic to succeed at lead nurturing. Many leads won’t be ready to buy from you yet, usually due to timing, but it could be for a whole host of their own reasons.

Sales should systematically hand over these contacts to marketing so that marketing can nurture them until they’re ready to engage. Time spent with sales and marketing teams on deciding what this recycling tactic will be is surely not wasted. Make sure to schedule a time to revisit the process established, asking yourself what more can be done.

6. Track Analytics

You must track where your prospects came from, what piqued their interest initially to convert them into leads (what they looked at on your site, what they downloaded, etc). This will give you a clear picture of the tactics and channels that work for you, yielding the best results.

Analytics will also allow you to tweak what isn’t working. A regular analysis of your marketing efforts will allow you to prioritise and improve, so you can commit your time to only the very best tactics that work for your business.

How do you keep sales and marketing alignment in check?

Christabelle Tani is a Digital Content Marketer at g2m Solutions, a Sydney-based B2B marketing agency

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