You have a great product or service and you’ve been making good inroads with your sales and marketing activities; however, you’re still experiencing a cycle of revenue highs and lows. If you’re looking to expand your client base and maintain a more consistent flow of quality prospects, to convert into paying customers and bring stability to your business then read on.

Having a strong relationship between your sales and marketing team is vital. Yet, some businesses still find it hard to align these two very important functions of the business, in some cases, they are run completely independent of each other.

Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing functions enjoy 38% higher sales win rates. From the types of people that sit within the departments, to their approach to technology, the contrast between sales and marketing teams can sometimes cause friction and can put unnecessary strain on your business. With them not working together, you won’t be able to expand your client base and nurture quality leads, which may turn into high paying customers.

Here are 5 things you can implement to align your sales and marketing teams for greater business success and a more enjoyable working environment:

Communication

It is important that sales and marketing have a great relationship, how do you encourage this? By ensuring the lines of communication are kept open.

Make sure the two have ample opportunity to talk to each other. Sales should be aware of what marketing activities are taking place and marketing should be aware of how sales are going to activate the marketing. B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies costs 10% or more of revenue per year. Any conscientious marketing team will be asking “what can we do to make the job of the sales team easier?” Sales on the other hand should be thinking about how and what to report back to marketing; which assets are working and is there any valuable customer feedback? 60-70% of B2B content created is never used. In many cases, this is because the topic is irrelevant to the buyer audience

Technology

Has your business evaluated the tools it’s using to ensure they are helping everyone, and more importantly, is everyone using them? Today’s sophisticated technology offers real time data and functionality to support multiple ways of working, from the way you access it, to the way you use it. From this data, your business can gather really intelligent insights to prospects and customer interactions.  Companies that automate lead management see a 10% or more bump in revenue in 6-9 months’ time.

As long as your teams are trained to use these tools and understand their capabilities there is no excuse for your sales and marketing teams not to be aligned in using the same technology. Ensuring both teams are making the best use and are working within the preferred platform will offer a deeper, richer level of reporting, improve the lead-management process, customer experience and the day to day running of your business.

Strategy

Is there a clearly defined strategy? Are both sales and marketing aware of this strategy? The business and its teams have got to know what you’re selling, how you’re selling it and to whom.

Understanding your ideal customer is the first fundamental step in a successful strategy. Developing buyer personas and getting them right will enrich the work that follows. Until you can nail down your ideal customer profile and what you can offer them, there is little point moving forward, as this forms the platform for all of the work that follows. 71%of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas. Once you have this in place you can target the perfect customer, get prospects to engage with you online, build brand awareness, direct traffic to your website and build an online community around your business.

Goal Alignment

At the very least sales and marketing should be working towards the same goals. Both should have visibility of the strategy and targets, with plenty of opportunity to communicate between the two on activity, successes, the ideal customer journey and campaign dates and timelines. Companies with “dynamic, adaptable sales and marketing processes” report an average of 10% more sales people on-quota compared to other companies.

In essence marketing should be setting up sales with leads who have had some touch points with your product or service. Aligning any messages and content to enable sales success. If sales do not know how and when to activate the marketing work, then everyone’s efforts are in vain and the opportunity may be missed. Aligning your teams and their efforts like this will ensure any activity will be visible and dealt with efficiently, resulting in closure one way or another.

Quality over quantity

Are the leads being generated meaningful and of a high quality? In an ideal world marketing should only be passing over high quality leads that are sales ready and match your ideal customer profile. However, some leads, whilst they may look good on paper, through further investigation and an initial phone call may not be right or may need further nurturing. 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to sales, but only 27% of those leads will be qualified.

Relying on your technology to help pipeline these leads and ensure that you keep your business at the front of their mind until they are ready, becomes an important part of the process. Highlighting the importance of the technology you use and how thoroughly your teams are using it. 18% of salespeople don’t know what a CRM is.

Marketing qualified leads are only part of what will be going on behind the scenes. Marketing should also be proactively targeting the companies that you want to do business with, nurturing these prospects to generate leads and to create opportunities that help you to meet your commercial objectives. Sales should be ready to pick up on this and continue nurturing prospects.

To be truly successful, sales and marketing must align, working to support each other. Behind every great sales team there is a set of marketing processes and principles being implemented. For your marketing activity to be truly successful there must be a sales process ready to activate it. Alignment of your sales and marketing will in turn bring business success and increase your revenue.

At Roots we are very lucky to have a great working relationship with Air Marketing Group, our sister company and award winning outsourced B2B sales and acquisition specialist. Meaning, that as well as having the skills and capabilities to merge with your own sales team, we can also integrate Air into your company if required.

If you want to align your sales and marketing teams, but don’t have the resource or expertise in-house, get in touch with us and we will help you to create an undivided sales and marketing function for your business. Give us a call today on: 01392 796 702 or email: contact@roots2market.co.uk