Win More Deals with Sales and Marketing Alignment

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We all have heard the jargon about sales and marketing alignment. It’s one of the latest B2B terms everyone is talking about and writing into objectives. It’s urgent. 

But, what does it even mean? Why is it so important? How do marketing and sales leaders find this rainbow unicorn that is sales and marketing alignment? How do you know when you’re there?  

What is Sales and Marketing Alignment?

“Sales and marketing alignment is a shared system of communication, strategy, and goals that enable marketing and sales to operate as a unified organization. Working together, aligned teams can deliver high-impact marketing activities, boost sales effectiveness, and ultimately grow revenue.”

— Highspot

That really boils down to blurring the line between sales and marketing so you have one cohesive, revenue-generation team that collaborates throughout the customer lifecycle (and customer, not buyer, is intentional because that lifecycle doesn’t end the day the deal closes).

Sales and marketing never were sales and marketing; it was sales or marketing.

True alignment means marketing works within the sales team and sales works within the marketing team. It’s a singular focus on the customer and their experience from the first time they become aware of your brand for the duration of your relationship.

Why is Sales and Marketing Alignment Important?

As the world learns to cope with the post-pandemic reality, businesses rush to understand the new realities of buyer expectations shaped through years of remote work and self-guided learning. 

The change in buyer’s behavior coincides with the global economic uncertainty, complicating the picture even more. Interest rates, supply chains, energy transitions, and conflict influence how companies make decisions, including what they buy. 

Surviving changing economic and buyer conditions requires collaboration between revenue-generation teams. Simply put, aligning sales and marketing might not be optional for much longer. 

Studies show that customers expect more engagement in evaluating potential vendors and partners. The catch is they don’t necessarily want to engage directly with sales.

This shift in buyer behavior is where Engagement Marketing comes into play. Engagement Marketing can be high-touch and hands-on, or it can be completely touchless marketing enabling your buyer to and through the point when they initiate a conversation with you. 

And Engagement Marketing isn’t just for marketing. It includes sales as well.

Being able to provide such a vast range of buyer engagement necessitates a range of people with different strengths; hence, aligning sales and marketing to draw on the skill sets of all.

How Do You Align Sales and Marketing?

Engagement Marketing is telling your value story through immersive and interactive platforms. It gives your audience the power to explore while drawing on known psychological motivations to convince them to explore. 

It takes passive one-directional content and transforms it into collaborative, insightful experiences. 

Adopting Engagement Marketing and sales means not just transforming content but transforming the process of how you communicate with internal and external audiences.

The technology now exists to create omnichannel experiences that satisfy customers’ demands for engagement while providing sales teams opportunities to act consultatively. This combination of personalized customer engagement and sales simplifies and shortens the sales process. 

In adjusting your marketing and sales strategies to adopt these technologies, you will find that alignment is required. It is almost impossible to digitally transform sales and marketing organizations successfully without alignment. The initiative calls for insight from both sides of the customer problem-solving journey. Marketing commands the message, the product, and the campaigns while sales know the buying cycle, common objections, and customer feedback.

Think of how much more powerful your marketing and selling will be with all of those insights combined into one beautiful, customer-centric, value-driven experience?

When Do You Have Sales and Marketing Alignment?

With sales and marketing aligned, there is no waste. There is a synergy and a collaboration within the larger revenue-generation organization where knowledge and insight is shared and put into action. Sales consider themselves just as valuable to marketing as marketing is to sales. 

Campaigns, initiatives, plans, and objectives come together cohesively with everyone working toward the same goal. Because we all have the same goal, right? 

If your organization struggles to communicate a consistent value story for complicated solutions and engage buyers, register for this on-demand webinar, “$1 Trillion in Loses: The Cost of B2B Sales and Marketing Misalignment,” to learn more about achieving sales and marketing alignment and the cost of getting it wrong.