5 Ways to Encourage Sales and Marketing Alignment

Jul. 13, 2010

With the buying process changing to one where customers take more control, sales and marketing alignment gets even more crucial for a successful business strategy. However, despite the fact that marketing and sales teams are working towards similar goals, it often seems like they just can’t get along.

How can you encourage sales and marketing alignment in your organization?

1. Identify your ideal customer. Ensuring that both departments have a clear idea of who your organization’s ideal customers are can help you simplify the lead hand-off process and help your demand generation initiatives. If you know who your target customers are, then you can be sure you’re marketing along the correct channels, and that leads from these sources are viable for sales.

2. Define a common language. Often sales and marketing departments have different definitions of different terms and this can be extremely detrimental especially when it comes to things like leads. A lead could be:

A name on a purchased list
An analytics goal conversion
Somebody who fills in a web form
Somebody who downloads a resource or attends a webinar
Somebody who passes BANT questions (budget, authority, need, timeline)
Somebody who wants to talk to a sales rep

Having a clear definition of what your organization considers a lead to be can facilitate the lead generation and hand-off process (often one of the largest pain points for sales and marketing teams).

3. Identify and agree on rules of engagement at key interface points. Knowing who is going to do what is crucial for any successful business strategy. When everyone has a clear idea of when they are going to take action it minimizes confusion and can help your organizations run smoothly in tandem. Some key interface points could be:

Responding to demo or “contact us” requests
Following up with webinar registrants
Returning leads to marketing for further nurturing
Dealing with closed / lost opportunities
Determining who will nurture live opportunities

4. Operate as a single team. By committing to different team building strategies (weekly sales and marketing meetings, opening communication channels etc.) you can help to diminish the view that many sales and marketing departments have of “them” versus “us.”

5. Measure what you want to improve. What areas are you looking to improve between your sales and marketing teams? Determining these, can help you measure your alignment and determine where your integration is falling short. Some common metrics you might want to improve are:

Sales ready leads count
Opportunity conversions: absolute count, percentage of sales-ready leads converted
All lead sources: referral, inside sales, sales prospecting
Closed business by lead source

Image by ePublicist on Flickr

Posted by Amberlie Denny at July 13, 2010 8:00 AM

Comments

Tewks

All great points. Brian Carroll (http://blog.startwithalead.com/) has done some good work around universal lead definition, and I'd also point to Greg Malpass (http://www.tractionsm.com/_/Home.html) as the guru on operational lead management.

- Tewks

TheMarketingMojo.com

Richard Sharp

Hi Tewks

Thanks for your kind comment. I'm a big fan of Brian's work and co-incidentally did a presentation with Greg a could of years back. You've given me a great idea for a webinar guest presenter...

Richard