5 Major Reasons Sales and Marketing Alignment Is Crucial for Skyrocketing Growth

When sales and marketing get in sync, magic happens. The combination is an elixir for organizations willing to perform better. But how do sales and marketing find a more cohesive path to deliver the business results you want? And, how to forge a stronger partnership between sales and marketing teams?

Businesses have been asking this question for many years now.

Aligned teams can dramatically improve your sales and revenue. Working in sync drives growth increases sales, and allows different teams to work better, together.

Still, teams struggle to work in harmony. Do you know the reason?

The bottlenecks often include office politics and distributed workforces. So, here we will discuss how to forge a better sales and marketing alignment for the best business results.

Why Do You Need Sales and Marketing Alignment?

With endless choices in front of them, the modern customer is already struggling with information overload. Brands also push personal services and numerous product lines to meet people's needs. But, it actually overwhelms a customer.

Together, all these things make a purchase decision much more difficult. Trust factors also play a significant role here as customers can't trust every other brand brandishing the USPs of their products. According to a study, 81% of customers admitted that numerous options and too much information make a purchase decision difficult.

One significant benefit of working with aligned teams is that they help consumers navigate the complex emotional process of making purchase decisions. The marketing department shares these inputs with the sales teams so that they can refine their communication accordingly.

Now, let's discuss their roles.

The Role of a Sales Team

The sales team is directly responsible for converting leads into customers. They build and manage relationships and also work on retention. If the need arises, they also resolve customer issues. Since sales is a multi-stage activity, the salespeople must keep an eye on the entire customer journey and adapt their communication accordingly. That's the reason sales is so crucial for businesses. They are the lifeline of any organization.

Image Source

However, a blind focus on sales may backfire, and you may end up ruining your prospects and clients in the long run.

The Role of a Marketing Team

Enter marketing. Marketing takes care of the parts sales often overlooks, e.g., creating awareness, educating about the product, ensuring the quality of leads, and crafting enticing messages.

The customers need to be made aware of your product, and marketing people know precisely what they need to hear. Their job is to craft thoughtful marketing messages to push the prospects down the sales funnel. Without a marketing strategy, you won't have a target audience and, ultimately, no sales.

Image Source

So, why do you need to align the two teams?

Reasons Sales and Marketing Alignment Is Crucial

According to a study, nearly 75% of leads never reach the conversion stage when the sales and marketing teams aren't aligned.

This statistic indicates how wasteful misaligned sales can be. Aligned teams achieved a 34% increase in new business revenue. So, even though the ultimate objective of both teams appears to be the same, their playing fields are entirely different.

The marketing team aggressively generates leads, and the sales team leaves no stone unturned to convert those leads. But sadly, both the teams work independently and hence fail to achieve their common objectives.

Here are five significant reasons why aligned teams are so crucial for the growth of your business.

1. Helps Create a Single Customer Journey

Aligned teams collaborate and share their insights about their customers. Otherwise, a major disconnect can happen in their degree of understanding of the customer.

Your marketing and sales teams may be on entirely different trajectories regarding their perceptions of how a customer moves between different stages in the sales funnel.

Image Source

This is one of the major reasons why leads don't turn into customers. Customers are smart. They can sense a disconnect between your marketing pitch and your sales process as soon as they interact with your brand.

The results may surprise you when teams are aligned towards a mutually understood customer journey. The collaboration should start right after a customer is first exposed to your brand, i.e., when they hear about it. And it should last till your last communication with them.

2. Helps Different Teams Agree on a Customer Persona

Again, serious disagreements often happen between marketing and sales teams about their perceptions of the target audience. It results in both the teams looking for different qualities in the same customer persona. If your idea of your target customer is unclear, it affects everything from marketing messages to sales plan.

With that said, it becomes crucial to agree on a customer persona. It will allow you to market to them as per their personality traits at each stage of their journey without any disconnect.

Image Source

3. Helps You Deal With the Shifting Nature of Markets

Your marketing team will identify people interested in your product. In contrast, the sales team filters this list and focuses on people ready to make a buying decision soon.The driving factors that make a person interested are pretty different from those that make them ready to buy.However, with the changing nature of markets, sales and marketing teams should be flexible about their buyer personas. Customers' pain points keep changing, and if you don't adapt, you won't move even an inch ahead.These dynamic changes in market trends can be overcome by the marketing and sales team collaborating and working in tandem.

4. Helps You in Customer Outreach

Even though both departments are equally valuable, marketing should take precedence. Sales have become increasingly difficult in the past decade, mainly owing to the boom in cold calling, cold emailing, and other forms of unsolicited marketing. People just don't like it.

The best marketing approach is to figure out where your customers usually hang out. This allows you to meet them at their preferred hangout place, whether online or offline. Ofcourse, we are talking about various popular online channels here. Once your marketing team figures that out, they can start a targeted campaign to attract customers.

And once a few interested customers show their hands, your sales team can easily take it from there!

5. Helps You Track Joint KPIs

Even if you hate tracking joint KPIs, the strategy tells you what you need to fix. When the teams are not aligned, they might track different KPIs. For the sales team, KPIs like overall conversion rate and new accounts created are far more critical than lead quality and quantity or advertising results.However, aligned teams can reduce this friction through weekly meetings and daily collaboration. In those meetings, sales and marketing teams can share customer pain points and their preferences and discuss how they can use this data to turn missed conversions into sales.

Final Words

Aligned teams can refine your brand message and make it look uniform, consistent, and professional. If different teams use different terminologies, it may not only sound unprofessional but will also confuse your customers. It will quickly erode customer trust.

Again, it's essential to craft your marketing messages according to your buyer personas and their stage in the customer journey. Targeted marketing also helps you plug in the various loopholes in sales. Any disconnect here will lead to the failure of your entire sales campaign. That's why sales and marketing alignment are often called innovative marketing and should be practiced by every business to succeed.