Do your company’s sales and marketing teams speak to each other? Alignment between sales and marketing is a common issue that can bleed a company’s bottom line dry if not properly addressed. This coordination between two integral teams is one of the single biggest businessopportunities to improve performance and ROI. Below are some of the benefits of marketing and sales alignment, and a few tips from top industry experts.
The Struggle to Align Sales and Marketing
In the past, marketing to customers was fairly straightforward. Depending on the type of business, new clients were generally acquired through such things as personal contact, mailers, or even telephone sales. Today, both marketing channels and customers are drastically different. There are many more ways to reach customers, who are now largely in charge of the messages they receive.
Most companies have no idea how much of their marketing budget is wasted through fruitless exercises each year. According to some recent B2B statistics, sales reps ignore as many as 50% of marketing leads, and up to $1 trillion annually is wasted on lost sales productivity or futile marketing expenditures. Buyers today are wise to “sales-speak,” so companies that remain stuck in the past or fail to coordinate activities are destined to fall behind.
Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment
No company wants to continue spinning its wheels by losing sales or wasting marketing dollars. Pardot, recently conducted a webinar that specifically addressed the benefits of aligning sales and marketing functions in an organization. Among them were:
- Standardizing lead qualification. Using the same CRM, marketing can automatically score and qualify leads based on various data points, some provided by the sales team. Sales then receives prioritized leads, which saves time.
- Automatic lead assignment. As just mentioned, this coordination allows leads to be automatically funneled to the best sales associate for each type of prospect.
- Relationship-building with leads. A coordinated program can be established which will allow nurturing campaigns to be established for some of the colder leads, which will begin bearing fruit over time.
How Your Company Can Move Forward
Since both teams ultimately have the same goals, more sales, it would follow that better alignment would benefit all involved. Fortunately, the areas that need fixing, specifically communication and data can be fixed.
According to Marketeo, when sales and marketing teams are in sync, a business becomes 67% better at closing deals. Revenue and profit growth is faster over time, as is the rate of customer retention. Much of this is due to an investment in sales enablement, which includes both an investment in in-depth training as well as the adoption of new technology to leverage the many marketing channels now available, including social media.
It would seem logical that sales and marketing are working to the same ends, yet lack of coordination in these functions erodes a company’s ROI. When sales and marketing begin to work in tandem, leads get more attention, sales are closed more quickly, and profit margins are more favorable.
