Are Your Marketing and Sales Teams on the Same Page?

Throughout the pandemic, businesses have needed to continuously adapt as customer needs and preferences evolve. But that quick adaptation is difficult when the business lacks alignment between the departments that most frequently speak to potential customers: sales and marketing.

When sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned,?both suffer: In fact, sales-marketing misalignment is estimated to cost businesses?more than $1 trillion each year . Why? This misalignment can lead to a lack of trust and understanding between the two departments, which makes every step of working together more difficult and, therefore, slower.

When businesses need to adapt their sales or marketing efforts quickly, misalignment that costs the company a day or two can mean big changes to business outcomes, like fewer sales and lost revenue.

Let’s start by looking at misalignment around objectives. Imagine a company’s salespeople are having conversations with leads that enlighten them about their buyers’ changing business operations and the new needs that are resulting but they aren’t sharing this information quickly with the marketing team. If the marketing team doesn’t know about prospective customers’ changing needs, they can’t create content or campaigns to address these updated pain points. That means all the sales collateral is outdated.

Misalignment can stem just as easily from the marketing side of the equation. For example, a marketing team might have noticed that the website’s blog posts addressing certain buyer pain points are spiking in traffic as people search for solutions online. But if they aren’t communicating these trends to the sales team, the salespeople taking calls might not know to mention solutions for those fresh pain points potentially losing buyers.

In both examples, the lack of communication and an effective feedback loop is causing both teams to lose opportunities — leading to fewer sales and less revenue for the organization.

This issue has become such a hot topic that?Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies?with more than 200 employees have listed it as their?third biggest marketing priority?– ahead of understanding marketing ROI and reducing acquisition costs.

Ref - https://hbr.org, superoffice.com/