How to Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment for Faster Growth and Revenue

Sales and marketing misalignment is a common and costly problem in many organizations. Studies show that businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are >67% (source: https://www.invoca.com/blog/10-stats-that-will-drive-your-sales-marketing-alignment) more effective at closing deals and >58% (source: https://www.lxahub.com/stories/sales-and-marketing-alignment-stats-and-trends-2023) better at retaining customers. However, misalignments frequently occur due to differing goals, poor communication, organizational silos, and unclear roles and responsibilities. This prevents companies from maximizing growth, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Aligning sales and marketing should be a priority for leadership teams looking to improve performance.

Why Sales and Marketing Teams Misalign

Sales and marketing misalignment often happens due to conflicting team goals and priorities. The sales team is typically focused on hitting quarterly targets and closing deals, while marketing aims for longer-term goals like building brand awareness and generating qualified leads.

In addition, lack of communication and collaboration between sales and marketing leads to misaligned efforts. The teams may operate in silos, not sharing key information, strategies, and insights with each other. Poor alignment of shared goals and processes creates disconnects.

Organizational politics can worsen the divide as sales and marketing compete for influence, budget, and executive attention. Unclear roles and responsibilities between the teams also need to be clarified, such as who owns what parts of the customer journey.

According to a Harvard Business Review article (source: https://hbr.org/2018/06/when-sales-and-marketing-arent-aligned-both-suffer), sales teams perceive marketing-generated leads and content as less helpful for closing sales. Tension escalates, impacting the customer experience and company growth.

The High Costs of Sales and Marketing Misalignment

Misalignment between sales and marketing teams can be extremely costly for organizations. Four key costs include lost sales opportunities, wasted marketing budget, lower customer satisfaction, and slower company growth.

When sales and marketing are not aligned, marketing may generate leads that sales is not equipped to close. This results in missed sales opportunities and revenue left on the table. According to one survey, 57% of marketers say misalignment has led to lost sales. (source: https://www.sugarcrm.com/blog/sales-marketing-misalignment-cost)

Marketing budgets are also wasted when messaging and campaigns are not optimized for sales follow-up. For example, marketing may drive low-quality leads that sales can't convert, resulting in wasted ad spend and personnel time. This issue is common, with 81% of sales reps saying leads from marketing need to be qualified. (source: https://www.lairedigital.com/blog/calculating-the-cost-of-misalignment-between-sales-and-marketing )

Furthermore, misaligned teams provide a disjointed customer experience between initial outreach and sales follow-up. This leads to frustration for the customer and lower satisfaction. With proper alignment, teams send consistent messages and offer consistent experiences.

Ultimately, all these issues contribute to slower company growth when sales and marketing are not aligned. The entire revenue engine operates suboptimally, hampering lead generation, conversion rates, and revenue expansion.

Benefits of Aligning Sales and Marketing

Aligning sales and marketing teams can provide significant benefits for a business. According to research from LinkedIn, aligned sales and marketing teams achieve 24% faster growth rates and 27% faster profit growth than non-aligned teams. (source: https://www.superoffice.com/blog/sales-marketing-alignment/ ) Some key benefits of aligning sales and marketing include:

Increased Revenue and Profits

With aligned goals and processes, sales and marketing can collaborate more efficiently to generate and close more leads. This directly translates into higher revenue and profits.

Faster Growth

Collaboration between sales and marketing enables scaling the entire sales funnel faster. Marketing can generate more quality leads for sales to close, fueling rapid company growth.

Better Customer Experiences

Alignment minimizes handoffs and provides continuity from attracting prospects to serving customers. This improves customer satisfaction and retention.

Higher Win Rates

When marketing nurtures higher quality leads tailored to sales, reps can close them more effectively. Alignment also enables customizing pitches to prospects.

Clearer Focus

With shared goals across functions, the entire revenue engine focuses efforts on mutual objectives with less redundancy.

Defining Shared Goals

One of the most critical steps for aligning sales and marketing is to define shared goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Historically, sales teams have focused on revenue, bookings, and quota attainment goals. Meanwhile, marketing has prioritized leads, traffic, and engagement metrics. This leads to misalignment.

According to Forbes, sales and marketing teams must agree on joint KPIs that ladder up to broader business objectives. For example, they may agree to focus on revenue growth, customer acquisition cost, and net new customers. Setting shared goals clarifies focus areas and desired outcomes.

Additionally, sales and marketing should agree on clear definitions of success to ensure everything is clear. For example, they should align on a qualified lead (source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2022/04/15/how-to-align-marketing-and-sales-goals-for-success/ ). With shared goals and success metrics, sales and marketing have a joint mission to execute.

Improving Communication

One of the most important ways to align sales and marketing is by improving team communication channels. Both formal and informal communication should be encouraged.

Set meetings between sales and marketing, such as weekly or monthly status meetings, allow the teams to share progress and insights. Include discussions around goals, metrics, challenges, and accomplishments. This formal communication ensures that the teams are looped in on each other's work.

In addition to set meetings, foster informal collaboration through tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams. This gives salespeople and marketers a direct line to ask questions, share ideas, and work together in real-time. An open channel for informal chat helps break down silos.

Both sales and marketing should share insights openly with each other. Marketing should guide sales on positioning, messaging, and collateral. Sales should update marketing on customer needs, objections, and any gaps in the marketing materials. This free flow of insights helps the teams stay aligned.

Creating Joint Metrics

Aligning sales and marketing requires establishing shared key performance indicators (KPIs) that both teams care about and are collectively accountable for. This ensures that everyone is focused on the same business goals and outcomes.

Important metrics are lead generation, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), percentage of leads worked, and conversion rate. (Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/tried-and-true-sales-marketing-alignment) Other essential KPIs are deal size, sales cycle length, win rate, and customer lifetime value.

By tracking these metrics transparently in a dashboard, sales and marketing can monitor progress and identify areas for improvement. (source: https://martech.org/kpis-that-connect-5-metrics-for-marketing-sales-and-product-alignment/) Teams should review the metrics together regularly to course correct when needed.

Joint accountability for shared goals and metrics motivates better collaboration and removes finger-pointing. It instills a "one team" mentality focused on serving customers and driving growth.

Developing Integrated Processes

Developing integrated processes that improve workflow and eliminate inefficiencies is essential to align sales and marketing. Start by mapping out the handoffs between sales and marketing across the customer journey. Identify any gaps where sales and marketing are disconnected. For example, marketing may generate leads, but there is a lag before sales follow-up. Sales may close deals, but marketing needs to be promptly informed to trigger customer onboarding. Documenting workflows end-to-end enables you to visualize pain points.

Next, bring sales and marketing together to brainstorm improvements. Look for ways to streamline handoffs, increase transparency, and set clear expectations. For instance, marketing could classify leads by sales readiness and provide insights to help sales prioritize follow-ups. Sales could categorize customers to inform marketing targeting and personalization. Adding Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can also enhance accountability around lead response times or campaign launch delays.

Technology like CRM, MAP, and marketing automation systems can facilitate integrated workflows when properly adopted across teams. However, the key is process design first, then smart application of technology. Well-defined workflows, service level agreements, and ongoing collaboration will ensure integrated processes translate to tangible sales and marketing alignment.

According to research by Smart Insights, companies that align sales and marketing processes through shared workflows and systems experience 36% higher customer retention rates. (Source: https://www.smartinsights.com/marketing-planning/marketing-strategy/integrating-sales-marketing/)

Fostering Collaboration

Cross-functional teams comprised of sales and marketing staff can boost collaboration and understanding between the departments. These teams tackle projects together, giving visibility into each other's roles. Shared tools and systems unite sales and marketing, providing a centralized database to coordinate messaging, access materials, and track progress. Joint trainings bring the teams together to learn best practices, build skills, and strengthen relationships. According to research, companies with sales and marketing personnel who attend collaborative trainings achieve 24% faster growth.

As the experts at HubSpot suggest, "Joint trainings help sales and marketing professionals better understand each department's goals, challenges, and processes." (Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/experts-marketing-sales-collaboration-more-effective)

Conclusion

Aligning sales and marketing is a collaborative process rather than a one-time initiative. Both teams must continuously work together, communicate, and adapt as business needs evolve. While close alignment requires time and effort, the payoff makes it well worth it.

Companies that align sales and marketing enjoy increased revenue, faster growth, better customer experiences, and many other benefits. The rise in performance can be significant. Rather than putting it off, organizations should take steps now to bring sales and marketing together. Start with quick wins like defining shared goals and improving communication channels. Over time, build processes for collaboration across the two teams.

With sales and marketing firing on all cylinders, companies gain an unbeatable competitive edge. They are positioned to capture growth opportunities and accelerate success. The time to align is now.