Pt 2: Are Your Sales & Marketing Aligned?

This article is the second in a five-part series entitled?Is Your Marketing Working??Missed the intro? Start?here .

The purpose of hiring sales and marketing teams is simple: acquire right-fit customers at the lowest possible cost. (???profit margins!)

Many teams lose sight of this goal. Sales & marketing become siloed, using a "move fast and see what sticks" approach that is often reactive and rarely aligned.

These teams are often are at odds with one another, fighting for ownership of activities and rowing in different directions in the same boat.

Every human across sales and marketing have to be aligned to reach optimal success in growing your business.

Will misaligned teams still bring in new sales? Of course. But at a much higher cost to the business.

Aligning sales and marketing teams for ultimate customer acquisition bliss comes down to 2 things: measurable goals + customer ecosystem map.

Measurable Goals

Bring both teams together. Ask each to bring data around their activities and recent successes. Lead an open conversation with a curious and exploratory mind that seeks knowledge, not "who is right". Ask questions like:

1. How is marketing qualifying leads?
2. How is sales qualifying leads?
3. What metrics are we using to determine accuracy of those metrics?
4. What is the ecosystem a prospect goes through before signing?
5. What messaging touch points did they have throughout the process?
6. Which messages work best?
7. How do we know that?
8. What would each team like from the other to be more successful?
9. What are barriers to making those things happen?
10. What is ONE thing that would change your work for the better next quarter?

Customer Ecosystem Map

To understand strengths and gaps in inbound & sales pipelines, you need to understand the journey your prospect takes in becoming a customer. Gone are the days of the sales funnel as we know it. We now understand that users exist in a non-linear ecosystem, with different thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, at each touch point.

Thoughts

These are the unique questions, problems, and concerns that a person will have at various stages of the customer journey. Think about early problems they may not have realized (demand), questions they have about the right solutions once they do (differentiation) and concerns they have about making the purchase (sales objections). Create a response to every one of these within a messaging framework

Feelings

Because people are people, each of these thoughts will have a feeling attached to it. Understanding these feelings will be the make or break between building trust and making someone feel absolutely terrible. For example, if at the demand generation stage a customer realizes they have a need they feel shame for missing in the first place, a marketing or sales message that reinforces that shame, rather than normalizing the fact that most people don't know about this issue, could be your make or break. Take the time to listen to sales, marketing, and customers to understand feeling states throughout the journey.

Behaviors

Check your data to understand where customers come from, what content they consume along the way, and what ultimately leads to a sale. Then look beyond your own data: conduct secondary research into your market, competitor platforms, and review sites to see what gaps you may have in your understanding. Put yourself in the shoes of your customer: if you had their problem, where would you go to try and solve it?

Engage in these exercises often, with both your sales and marketing teams. Lead by example with an appetite of curiosity and a willingness to have your mind changed with new information. The third and unspoken success metric of a well-aligned sales and marketing unit is great leadership. Great leaders research and read up on how to do better for your teams, so you're already on the right track.

Need more help? I got you.

?? If you’re ready to work with an agency that makes you more money, matches your energy, challenges what's possible, and gets all fired up about your brand outcomes, let’s do it:?https://lnkd.in/eG56BF7C