Now that we’ve covered how sales and marketing can and should align, as well as explored how marketing tactics impact sales (and vice versa), it’s time for a more concrete discussion about how to align sales and marketing: not in theory, but in the real world, at your company.
At its core, aligning the two departments comes down to these four essential steps:
In pursuing any strategy, it’s important to ensure that you’ve got specific, measurable goals and KPIs upon which you can gauge the success of your efforts. Similarly, when beginning an alignment effort, you should work with sales leadership to determine what you’re trying to achieve and break that down into the performance indicators for both teams.
As part of this process, compile data from both sales and marketing teams in order to establish baselines and build a system for tracking progress.
Do sales and marketing team members agree on the definition of a sales qualified lead? Do you measure total revenue in the same way and have the same criteria for determining when a lead has gone cold? Establishing a common language and set of definitions helps teams avoid confusion and streamline the development of smart strategies that benefit both parties. By ensuring you’re all on the same page, you’ll not only have the same expectations of what will come from sales/marketing-aligned activities, but will also be better able to trade data, discuss outcomes and develop insights based on what’s happening in the other department.
Sales and marketing teams often don’t understand each other: marketers are confused as to why the sales team can’t close in the leads they pass them, and the sales pros are frustrated by the cold or off-target prospects handed to them by the marketing team. Take the time to learn about these frustrations and reset expectations in both departments. By understanding what the other group needs, you’ll be able to set responsibilities and expectations to increase predictability, communication and profit.
Set due dates to keep everyone in both departments accountable. By aligning timelines, you can be sure that the marketing team is targeting the right leads at the right times, and sales can stay abreast of what stage in the nurturing process leads are in. You can postpone or push up campaigns in accordance with the needs of the other department, and stay aligned with what’s going on in the other department’s world.
Let us know: have you put these four steps into practice at your company? What was the outcome?
Photo Credit: Sustainable Sanitation via Flickr Creative Commons
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