Remember fourth-grade geometry? You were introduced to ‘parallel lines’ and taught that they never met. In the B2B landscape, that’s how sales and marketing teams seem to be progressing. B2B sales and marketing collaboration is rare, but you need to be vigilant on this front. Sales might be in the driver’s seat, but the map is in the control of the marketing team. 

Misalignment leads to chaos: existing customers leave like flies because who wants to be in the middle of a civil war? And prospects? Well, their confusion and concerns are never addressed. According to HubSpot’s sales report, 52.2% of sales professionals attribute their sales and revenue losses to the misalignment between sales and marketing teams.

Sales and marketing teams, plagued by lack of compatibility, misinformation, or incomplete knowledge, often face an unfortunate fumble during a sales pitch. However, a comprehensive alignment in integrated sales and marketing strategies can lead to a 20.3% increase in win rate, with 22.1% of salespeople attributing increased deal closures as its key advantage.

Now, why does this ‘domestic rift’ exist in the company? And how can you put this to rest?

Here’s a quick guide on making your sales and marketing teams collaborate!

Understanding the Differences Between Sales and Marketing

You can often see sales and marketing teams operating wavelengths apart. Let’s analyze the reasons behind this animosity and understand why the divide just keeps widening:

And the consequences?

• No unified agenda: The “ to each his own” mantra comes to life when sales and marketing misalignment occurs. Both teams have a fragmented view of a unified agenda, making achieving the end goals impossible.

• Tracking different metrics: The absence of effective collaboration between the two teams can cause conflicts when determining key metrics that are responsible for upping your conversion rates.

• No specified target demography: If marketing teams do not heed sales team feedback, a fundamental disagreement results in deciding who the target audience is, thus resulting in resource wastage for disqualifying provided leads or pursuing unvetted ones.

• Customer distrust: If the sales and marketing teams do not see eye to eye, there will be communication gaps, which result in inconsistent brand messaging thus fostering customer distrust.

• Data discrepancies: When communication is scarce, information can slip through your fingers. With incomplete information, poor research, and minimal surveys, you’re rarely on the right track to intercept customer concerns, allay their fears, and close a deal.

The Role of Sales and Marketing in Demand Generation

In demand generation, you’re not looking for immediate results. You cannot. You have a long-term strategy: educate your audience, generate PR buzz, widen your consumer base, and engage existing customers.  This is where your marketing team comes in. Content marketing in sales and marketing or email marketing in sales and marketing inaugurates your first stint with substantial traffic. 

Now you have a data mine, and your marketing team has adequate ammunition to knock its competitors out of the park. It lies in wait: monitoring, tracking, and observing. You trail places of lead attrition, improve those touchpoints, score leads based on the extent of interaction, and pay close attention to customer preferences. 

Using inbound marketing for demand generation furnishes your sales team with vital information and research to understand potential buyer psychology and anticipate buyer reluctance, which culminates in successfully closing the sale.

Best Practices to Align Sales and Marketing

You might have picked up by now that there’s a universal consensus on the importance of sales and marketing alignment. So let’s look at some fundamental pointers that would help you achieve that:

• Agree on a buyer persona: While your marketing team might handle strategy, your sales team is the one responsible for successful conversion. So, a collaborative effort to define potential customer base and their pain points would enable judicious utilization of resources as well as shorten sales cycles.

• Set shared goals and objectives: Only integrated sales and marketing strategies can enable you to achieve your primary goal of generating revenue. It might seem that doing marketing is akin to armchair philosophizing, and sales is analogical to working at the grassroots level, but you cannot afford a gap in theory and practice in this business landscape. 

• Identify and set KPIs: Sales and marketing alignment is crucial when defining KPIs. Your sales and marketing teams shouldn’t have different definitions of success in key metrics and even a rift between which metrics to track. 

• Create content to support the strategy: Your strategy can be sublime, but your content is going to bridge the gap between yourself and your potential consumer base. Pull out all the stops when brainstorming content ideas. 

• Use a customer relationship management system: Using CRM helps you streamline the sales process as it organizes prospect contact lists, analyses buyer behavior that can help you in tailoring your sales strategies and increases client retention with follow-up calls or reminders.

• Improve the customer experience: Placing your customer at the center of your sales and marketing efforts can save you from being shortsighted and missing opportunities to retain your existing clientele. Train your customer success team to deliver prompt and customized responses to your clients. Customers should feel you’re genuinely interested in resolving their problem instead of feeling like they’re being reduced to a statistic. 

• Implement retention efforts, including win/loss efforts: Your sales and marketing endeavors should result in a positive-sum game, not a zero-sum game. Your consumer should walk away with a solution, and you should be able to meet your revenue goals. If you’re achieving any less than that, you need to evaluate where in the sales and marketing funnel you’re falling short and losing clients.

Conclusion

Your sales teams should be furnished with training and guidance on how to move forward with marketing plans, and your marketing strategy should be designed around sales feedback. This juxtaposition is crucial to maintaining brand uniformity. Once you’ve established a unified brand vision, you can grab customer attention and prompt recall with ease.

After generating excitement and intrigue around your brand, the next step is shedding the veil of mystery and focusing on selling. Your demand generation efforts have brought in leads that now require nurturing. This is where your sales team takes charge of the conversion process.

Are you ready to kickstart your lead generation journey? 

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Stop wasting time and effort brainstorming ways to generate leads. Allow us to do the heavy lifting for you instead. 

Contact us today!