Achieving sales and marketing alignment on small teams for SMBs...
can be really hard. As both a freelancer and in-house sales and marketer, I've seen it time and again. In small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), sales and marketing are two sides of the same shiny coin. Ideally, both departments work hand in hand to drive growth and hit shared goals.
However, in reality, it’s common for sales and marketing teams — especially in small businesses — to work in silos, leading to misalignment in goals and tactics. Marketing is focused on generating brand awareness and writing the next great white paper, while sales are laser-focused on nurturing their leads and closing deals. When they finally meet, both are confused by the other’s focus. Sound familiar?
If left unchecked, this misalignment can negatively impact the company’s revenue, employee morale, and customer experience. Having been on both sides (I still have cold call nightmares), I have some thoughts on this.
The Common Misalignment Issues
- Different Goals and Metrics: Marketing teams measure their success with metrics like website traffic, leads generated, form fills, and email click rates, while sales teams are focused on closing deals, hitting revenue targets, and building/maintaining customer relationships. This difference in priorities often leads to frustration and wacky meetings where both teams are singing different songs. Marketing feels like they’re driving leads and are excited about the latest 40% jump in email CTRs, but frustrated that sales aren't converting them. Sales feel like marketing is sending them unqualified leads and working on projects that don't ultimately close deals.
- Lack of Communication: In small teams, communication should be easier, but often it isn’t. Marketing may launch a campaign without consulting the sales team, which leads to a gap in messaging. Sales might be fielding common customer objections that marketing isn’t aware of, leaving marketing campaigns ineffective. One time the marketing team came up with a brilliant idea for a complex infographic and spend an entire month on it. I gave it to sales with a big smile on my face, and they said (in so many words), "Why did you make this?" and then sent me a wishlist of infographics they actually needed instead. (Remember the avocado Christmas present kid?)
- Failure to Adapt to Change: Sales teams are closer to the customers and prospects, meaning they are often the first to notice changes and nuances in the market and have intimate knowledge of their pain points, complaints, troubles, successes, etc. regarding the product(s). Marketing may be slow to -- or never catch up with -- these nuances that come from the battlefield. This can lead to misaligned efforts where sales are pushing one message, and marketing is pushing another. Also, in my experience, sales and marketing teams somehow always do their most important work in completely different tools. The sales team is in Salesforce and Marketing is in Pardot... All leads are collected in MailChimp but customers can only receive emails from HubSpot... Jimmy from sales still exclusively logs his calls on Post-it notes but Sandra from marketing is doing an audit in SF of customers who have received phone calls in the past 30 days... You can gather how messy this gets. Both teams need to get organized and work with each other, even if that means putting the post-it notes away and embracing one unified platform.
How to High-Five and Align Sales and Marketing for SMB Success
- Shared Goals and Metrics: The first step to alignment is to ensure that both teams are working toward the same objectives, short and long-term. Establish shared key performance indicators (KPIs) that everyone can agree on, like lead-to-sale conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and revenue generated from marketing-qualified leads (MQLs). Document these common goals and schedule check-ins when necessary. Both sales and marketing can refer to these goals and will have a stake in each other’s success. Jimmy can even write these on his Post-it notes.
- Improve Communication Channels: Set up regular meetings between sales and marketing to share insights and discuss strategies. In small teams, weekly or bi-weekly check-ins can make a big difference. Make sure these are structured or it will get wacky. Sales should use these meetings to communicate things like the objections they’re hearing from prospects, complaints they're hearing from customers, etc. while marketing can share upcoming campaign details and build a wishlist for marketing efforts.
- Get Smart About Your Stack: Aligning your tech stack is crucial for both teams to be on the same page. Use tools that integrate well with both sales CRM systems and marketing platforms. Especially for messy martech stacks, a good place to start is syncing CRM data with marketing automation tools to ensure that both teams have access to up-to-date information about leads and customers. If you're like most SMBs (don't lie, I know you are), your CRM contacts are a M E S S. Sales, don't kill me... But you need to assign everyone to take time out of their day(s) to review and update every. single. contact. Align on what fields are mandatory, set up naming conventions, fix typos, set up workflows to remove duplicate accounts, and expect marketing to bake you a cake because you have just made their future campaigns and metrics so, so beautiful. I cannot tell you how many glorious campaigns marketing wants to run and automate, but the contacts are such a mess that we can't make lists or pull any data that isn't... awful.
- Customer-Centric Approach: Both teams should always focus on the customer journey/experience. Getting everyone on board with understanding how a prospect becomes a lead and then moves from awareness to consideration to purchase can help sales and marketing craft a better experience. Encourage both teams to view themselves as part of a unified funnel rather than separate departments with distinct responsibilities and siloed tasks.
- Adapt Quickly to Market Changes: Both teams should be agile and ready to adapt to new information by the day. If sales notices a shift in customer behavior or market trends, they should relay that to marketing and marketing should pivot its strategies -- with a thumbs up from sales -- to stay relevant. Likewise, marketing should provide sales with the latest insights from campaign performance, ensuring that both are aligned on what’s working and, perhaps most importantly, what’s not.
- Celebrate Wins Together: It’s important to recognize and celebrate joint wins. If a marketing campaign brings in a high number of qualified leads that sales are closing left and right, celebrate that as a team success. Celebrating shared wins fosters a sense of unity and reinforces the idea that sales and marketing are both working toward the same goal.
For SMBs, strong sales and marketing alignment is critical to driving growth. I've been on both sides and have seen some interesting rivalries, complaints, and miscommunications over the years. With fewer silos, fewer Post-it notes, and more collaboration, small teams can achieve the kind of alignment that is desperately needed to compete.
