Before we even think about how we can ensure alignment between our Sales and Marketing teams, we need to understand why this alignment is so important for business success. It all boils down to one simple premise – ‘customer is at the core of every successful business strategy’. The fact is that the customer has changed drastically over the past couple of years. Today’s customer is well informed, tech savvy, impatient, demanding, and to a great extent unforgiving. Yes, choice can at times be evil. In such a scenario wooing customers, and more than that keeping them, is not an easy job. This is where better and consistent customer experience across customer touch points can be a key differentiator for your business. And, it takes perfect alignment between Sales and Marketing – the two functions that have maximum direct or indirect interaction with the customer at different stages of the customer lifecycle, to achieve this. Although this might look like a very obvious and logical deduction, most businesses seem to have completely missed the point until very recently.
Traditionally, Sales and Marketing have been two delineated functions driven by different end objectives. While marketers are focused on increasing the number of leads generated, sales executives can hardly think beyond their assigned sales targets. To improve the overall business performance as a team this misalignment needs to be addressed at highest priority.
Garima Rai, Head of Marketing – India and APAC, InsideView said, “If marketers focus only on maximizing the number of MQLs generated by their marketing engine, and sales executives follow a transactional selling approach, the end objective of onboarding and retaining the right customers gets completely lost. Businesses that realized this early on are strategically positioned as leaders in their respective domains, and those that are still following the age old approach are lagging behind and struggling to save their existence.”
Having established the importance of sales and marketing alignment in today’s context, I’d want to emphasize on certain key imperatives that foster perfect alignment between sales and marketing. Based on the results of a survey conducted by Demand Gen Report in partnership with InsideView, I have detailed seven such imperatives below:
- Focus on communication – First things first. Frequent and frank communication is the foundation for every successful relationship. It not only builds trust but helps both parties understand each other’s’ perspectives, and identify and address any bottlenecks that could be impacting the overall success of the business.
- Review processes – Change is the order of the day. In an extremely dynamic business environment where your customers’ buying behavior is changing faster than ever, it is extremely important for sales and marketing teams to collaboratively review and adapt key processes, such as lead scoring and routing, to the evolving needs of the market.
- Put lead quality before quantity – To boost revenues and improve retention and renewal rates, it’s important for sales and marketing folks to work together to define the ideal customer profiles, and ensure that the marketing engine focuses on generating high quality leads and improving leads to sales conversion rates, rather than bringing in too many low quality leads.
- Enrich prospect data – As account-based selling, social selling, and consultative selling are replacing traditional selling practices, it is extremely important for sales executives and marketers to have necessary insights about prospects. This can be achieved through data enrichment.
- Seek to understand – Mutual understanding is key to perfect alignment between sale and marketing. If the marketing organization is focused on meaningfully and tangibly impacting revenues, they need to decode the sales psyche. An understanding of what helps sales executives sell more effectively is key to the success of marketing.
- Align on pipeline – Both sales and marketing need to understand the importance of a healthy sales pipeline. If marketing shifts its focus from generating more leads to building a qualified sales pipeline, and sales collaborates with marketing to define ideal customer profiles, rather than applying a transactional sales approach, success is guaranteed.
- Give marketing variable compensation – The compensation structure for sales and marketing has traditionally been very different, and this to a great extent is accountable for the lack of alignment between the two functions. While marketers look at sales as the privileged class that is incentivized for performance, sales people look at marketers as ‘playing safe’. In such a scenario it’s important to revisit the compensation structure for marketers and tie it to the sales pipeline.
