Empower Your Sales & Marketing Alignment With Marketing Automation

In today’s digital world, where customers expect every interaction to be personalized and every product and service to be customized, sales simply can’t exist without marketing and vice-versa.

Fortunately, the better you align your sales and marketing teams, the more likely you are to delight your customers and prospects. In fact, businesses with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams are 6% more likely to exceed revenue goals^[i].

In this blog post, we’ll talk about the benefits of sales and marketing alignment and the challenges that businesses face during alignment. We’ll also talk about how marketing automation can help you to overcome those challenges for converting leads faster, providing superior CX, and witnessing better ROI.

So, let’s dive in!

Sales and Marketing Alignment for Business Success – A Statistical Picture

To truly delight your customer, it’s crucial you reduce friction by implementing a strategy to align your sales and marketing teams. Here’s a breakdown of the role of sales and marketing alignment for business success:

• 87% of sales and marketing leaders reported that collaboration between sales and marketing enables business growth^[ii].
• 94% of the top performing salespeople surveyed by LinkedIn called the marketing leads they receive either excellent or good^[ii].
• Marketing and sales teams that take an ABM approach together can be up to 6% more likely to exceed their revenue goals than teams less ABM-advanced^[iii].

Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing alignment are crucial for B2B companies that sell complex products to a group of decision-makers over an extended timeframe. Here are the benefits of sales and marketing alignment:

• A clearer and better understanding of customers
• A more informed and agile approach to the buyers’ journey
• Increased conversions by connecting faster with potential prospects
• Better engagement between sales and marketing for long-term value
• A single source of truth for decision-making about the success and failure of their efforts

Marketing and Sales Alignment Challenges That Business Face

60% of global respondents in a LinkedIn survey believed that misalignment between sales and marketing could damage financial performance^[iv]. In fact, 43% of the marketing and salespeople said the lack of accurate and shared data on target accounts and prospects was the biggest challenge when it comes to aligning sales and marketing teams^[v]. In general, the following obstacles stand in the way of marketing and sales alignment:

• Salespeople complain that the sales leads generated by marketing are useless.
• Marketing creates plenty of content that is sometimes no use for sales, and the sales teams end up creating their own content.
• Salespeople and marketers generally don’t agree on the barriers they face.
• Both the sales and marketing teams lose track of customer journeys.
• There is an inability within the organization to agree on the best tactics and winning strategies.

How Marketing Automation Makes Sales & Marketing Alignment Easier?

Aligning your sales and marketing team helps both departments reach their goals faster and witness better ROI. And if you have a robust marketing automation platform in your tech stack, you can easily align and improve your sales and marketing strategy.

Also, you’ll see exponential growth in conversion rates, revenue, and customer retention. Here’s how a marketing automation tool empowers your sales and marketing alignment:

1. Web Tracking & Analytics

Your sales team stands to gain a lot from tracking prospects’ web activity. How potential customers and prospects engage with your website and marketing assets can provide actionable insights into their needs, challenges, and interests.

If your marketing and sales reps have knowledge about which aspect of the website is making more impact, they can have a more accurate picture of the efforts they should be making.

2. Campaign Construction and Tracking

Constructing and analyzing marketing campaigns can provide actionable insights about the prospects’ interests in your brand. With the help of shared dashboards and reports in the marketing automation tool, your teams can see who’s engaging with your content and where that engagement is coming from.

Knowing how many qualified leads are associated with specific campaigns helps your sales and marketing team understand where their efforts are most effective.

3. Lead Scoring Resources

Predictive lead scoring resources can help sales and marketing teams alike by distinguishing higher quality leads from lower quality ones through automation and machine learning. The marketing automation tool makes the handoff between two departments smoother and allows for simpler and more efficient sales efforts.

4. Asset Management

Digital assets can be used by your cross-functional teams (marketing, sales, customer support, & design). With marketing and sales alignment, both teams don’t have to request assets separately. They can access assets from a centralized place, automate tasks like watermarking images, get sophisticated search capabilities for locating media files and manage permissions and other security permissions.

The Bottom Line

Keeping sales happy can make or break the success of marketing automation, and thus the effectiveness of marketing, so getting to a stage of alignment is critical. Only when sales and marketing are on the same page, can you maximize customer-centricity, creating a seamless journey from being a lead to the customer, and getting the best out of both teams.

Ready to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams Effectively? Let’s Talk!

Statistics References

^[i]https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/stats-that-prove-the-power-of-smarketing-slideshare
^[ii]https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/me/business/en-us/marketing-solutions/cx/2020/images/pdfs/moments-of-trust-v4.pdf
^[iii]https://www.forrester.com/report/Forrester+Infographic+ABM+Maturity+Corresponds+To+Better+Revenue+Results/-/E-RES157155
^[iv]https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/aligning-sales-and-marketing-the-art-of-winning
^[v]https://www.demandbase.com/