Sometimes when you’re cooking a meal, you’ll be cooking two different parts in separate pans. You might be boiling the pasta in one pan and cooking your sauce in another. If you spend too much or too little time on each, however, or you never combine the two, you could be in for a pretty bland meal. This analogy also works for sales and marketing: if you don’t align the two, you could be generating a bunch of unnecessary friction for your business. 

Here are some quick tips for aligning your sales and marketing teams: 

1. Meet regularly

For efficient sales and marketing alignment, marketers need to take the time to attend Sales meetings, whether they be weekly or monthly. This will allow Marketing to know how Sales is doing with their quotas and goals, and offer any support if required. Marketers can also use this time to share upcoming campaigns, content or offers that they will be promoting over the next week or month. Sales may even be able to provide content ideas or recommendations for future offers or blog posts. 

If you attend any industry meetings or conferences, make sure to send a representative from both Sales and Marketing. Not only will this allow your teams to get to know each other in a less traditional setting, it will help them to build rapport and encourage more collaboration by making the two teams appear as a unified front representing your business. 

2. Content creation process

We love a good process here at Karman Digital. They’re the backbone of any organisation, so you’ve got to get them right. Your sales representatives will be interacting with prospects all the time, so they’ll have the knowledge surrounding what gets customers excited. What they may not have, is a process for recording this feedback. 

Marketers may then want to hold a five minute brainstorming session at Sales meetings to ask what sort of content Sales would like to share with prospects or that might attract more leads. Outside of these meetings, you might want to use a Google spreadsheet where Sales can add any ideas they might have to improve marketing messaging. 

Speaking of messaging, it's a good rule of thumb to make sure that your messaging is matched over the whole campaign. Sales can help to provide the raw material that marketers then craft into excellent content. Which leads us to our next point… 

3. Coordinate your marketing campaigns with sales

Marketers will always be trying to promote new content and offers, so they need to make sure that the Sales team knows what’s happening. This way they’ll know what recent offers their leads are receiving. You may want to include your promotion plans within a shared Google calendar that includes the date and time of the promotion with any talking points and a description of the offer. 

Make sure that once Marketing has promoted a piece of content or an offer, they inform sales. Make sure that they include some good talking points linking to the offer or content, alongside a list of lead views that have been generated off the back of it. 

4. Agree on your personas

Marketers can often be quite precious when it comes to their marketing personas. However, without the input of Sales, who interact directly with potential customers, you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot. There needs to be collaboration over the creation of any marketing persona, as both Sales and Marketing will have a unique take on the key building blocks of each persona. 

If both teams agree on a particular persona, you’ll be able to create a unified approach across the board. If everyone is working from the same persona, you’ll reduce the chances of selling to the wrong sorts of leads. 

5. Sit in on each other’s calls

If members of the marketing team take the time to listen to their calls with prospects, they gain greater insight into how their process works and build targeted content out of it. If you know what the sales person’s talking points are, you can craft that perfect follow up email that contains the right sorts of offers and content. 

6. Track leads after the hand-off

Marketing’s work should not end once qualified leads are handed over to the salesperson. We could argue that it's even more important to monitor lead behaviour post-sales hand-off. If marketing has visibility into how a lead interacts with sales throughout the buyer journey, it’ll help to give Marketing a better understanding of both the buyer’s and the seller’s needs. 

If a lead drops out of the journey at a certain stage, retrospectives can be held that analyse how Marketing and Sales can better align their tactics. Your marketing team may then be able to create better targeted content that facilitates a smoother buyer’s journey overall. 

7. Use customer feedback

Feedback is a powerful tool and can be a driving force for reshaping your proposition. One of the best times to gather feedback for your business is during sales calls. It's a prime opportunity to discover potential customer pain points and motivations behind the purchase of your product or service. 

By picking out specific phrases and analysing the language that leads use, you can refine your marketing messaging alongside refining your company’s proposition. Not only will this help to align Sales and Marketing through collaboration, it will help you to gain a better understanding of how people feel about your brand. 

8. Have fun and get to know each other

The old locker room cliché is to just “get out there and have some fun,” and it’s something you can definitely apply to Sales and Marketing alignment. After all, if your teams get on with one another, they’ll work better together. Organise lunches, outings and celebrations to just have a bit of fun. This will help to build trust among team members and ensure people feel comfortable relying on one another for support.  

Summary

We hope you enjoyed this quick list of points for aligning your Sales and Marketing teams. If you’re looking to go a little deeper to really refine your sales and marketing offerings, we have exactly what you’re looking for. Our newest guide digs deep into Sales and Marketing and how you align these two critical teams to deliver the best outcomes for your business and your customers. 

If you have any questions about anything we’ve mentioned above or you’d like to know more, don’t hesitate to give us a call or drop us an email.