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Marketing and sales alignment
Improving marketing & sales alignment has many benefits. Company resources are used much more effectively, product launches have more success, upselling and cross-selling improves and customer churn is reduced. Add to that better communication between the teams and you can see how closely aligned marketing and sales teams generate more growth and more profit.
Benefits of marketing and sales alignment
You will understand your customers better
When marketing & sales teams are aligned you generate a better understanding of your customer profiles. Since different stakeholders and decision makers are involved at different stages of the buying process a unified understanding leads to smoother hand off of leads which vastly improves the customer experience.
Shared insights improve sales outcomes
Sharing the information about the market, leads, prospects, opportunities and customers helps to generate more high-quality leads and improves conversions and win rates.
Better utilisation of marketing and sales systems
When both teams are aligned, better use is made of systems such as your CRM tool which makes it easier for marketing and sales management to see what progress is being made with campaigns and opportunities. Updating contact records with information about engagement with campaigns helps salespeople to better judge when to engage with a customer. Equally, your marketing team can pick up leads that sales have decided are not yet sales ready.
Improve your account based marketing outcomes
Marketing and sales alignment eliminates redundancy and duplication which presents a seamless experience to your prospects. The closer marketing and sales are aligned the better campaigns and sales activities can be aligned to the account’s pains, issues and concerns. Moreover close alignment allows agility and fast pivoting when the situation inside and account changes
A better designed and executed brand and sales strategy
Marketing and sales alignment takes commitment and consistency, so it’s unsurprising that companies that achieve it are also more strategic and focused on the future, rather than just on the quarter. Rallying around the brand strategy helps to ensure that it is based on complete knowledge and leads to sales success.
Clearer mapping of the sales funnel
Mapping out the sales funnel, which personas are involved in each stage, what they care about and what you need to do to support them is a massive hurdle. Focusing externally and collaboratively helps to eliminate funnel silos and allows you to create and execute lead generation, nurturing, activation and retention campaigns. It also ensure that sales are empowered with the right sales tools.
Marketing and sales alignment methodology
Together we’ll create a clear understanding of customer needs, personas, and roles in the buying process. This can be taken from your brand and marketing strategy if you have one or we can workshop with your sales, product management, marketing and other customer facing teams and carry out customer research. We’ll then take this output and create a set of strong marketing and sales messages.
We’ll then collaborate to build the sales tools needed to help your sales team successfully collaborate with customers to develop and close sales opportunities. This can include for example marketing materials for prospecting, communications plans and templates, customer fluency prompts and need discovery questions and product collateral.
We’ll also look at your sales strategy and processes to ensure that we are covering all of your bases.
Then we’ll work together with sales and marketing to define what an ideal customer looks like, what a qualified lead looks like and define a workable process to ensure that each lead is either nurtured before being passed to sales and then either won or passed back to marketing with accountability for each step of the process.
Marketing and sales alignment deliverables
- A workshop with representatives from marketing, product management, sales and pre-sales to align on positioning, customer needs and customer personas and their roles in the buying process
- A messaging workshop to uncover the correct messages for each persona at each stage of their buying process
- A tool building workshop to construct lead generation and sales activation material for each stage in the buying process
My 5-point Client Satisfaction Promise
- Your marketing and sales alignment plan will be customised to your business and its unique challenges.
- Your investment and your payment schedule will be clear. If I can save you money by using what you already have, I won’t reinvent the wheel.
- We’ll discuss, agree on and document each step in the process. If I need you to pull together data or documents I’ll ask you before the relevant step begins.
- The work plan will comprise a number of milestones that will be clearly identified. We’ll review the project at the end of each milestone so that you can regularly evaluate the progress of the project.
- Sometimes the unexpected happens. If something extra is requested or required I’ll ensure you’re fully informed about the implications before you commit.
