Good collaboration between the marketing and sales teams is essential for a business. If the two departments do not work well together, this can lead to inefficiencies and missed sales opportunities. However, this intensive collaboration between marketing and sales has always been considered a challenge. And this is where marketing and sales alignment comes into play....
What does Marketing and Sales Alignment mean?
Marketing and Sales Alignment means the targeted promotion of intensive cooperation and coordination between the Marketing and Sales departments. Today, Marketing is visibly taking on more responsibility for the pre-qualification of interested persons before passing them on to Sales.
Why is marketing and sales alignment important?
Effective collaboration between Marketing and Sales offers many benefits:
Better leads: When marketing and sales work together effectively, they can generate high-quality leads and improve conversion rates.
Cost efficiency: duplication of efforts is avoided and resources can be used more effectively, which in turn saves costs.
Improved customer experience: by aligning marketing and sales activities, companies can create a seamless customer experience and improve customer relationships.
How do you achieve marketing and sales alignment?
The basic prerequisite for business success is the common alignment of all business units with the company's goals. However, there are several steps companies can take to better align marketing and sales:
Common goals: Ensure that marketing and sales goals are aligned and that both departments share common goals.
Common metrics: Define common metrics & evaluation grids and measure the success of marketing and sales activities based on these metrics.
Joint strategies: develop joint strategies to better understand and address customer needs.
Regular meetings: schedule regular meetings and encourage exchanges between marketing and sales to improve collaboration and ensure both departments are on the same page.
Technology: Use technology to integrate marketing and sales activities and create a seamless experience for customers.
Communication between departmentsshould be transparent and comprehensive, and there should be a mutual understanding of how to achieve goals, many of which can be achieved through a qualification matrix.
Marketing does not hand off prospects to sales until they have met key metrics that are important to the company.
Only as Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) they are handed over to Sales.
The task of sales is then to enter into personal contact with the prospect and accompany them until they make a purchase, but also to constantly evaluate the likelihood of purchase.
What are the benefits of marketing and sales alignment?
According to current studies, there are various statistics that justify such an approach also financially, here are a few statements compiled by pipeline.zoominfo.com
Companies with closely aligned sales and marketing functions have a 36% higher customer retention rate (marketingprofs.com)
Sales and marketing alignment also leads to 38% higher sales win rates (marketingprofs.com).
Aligning sales and marketing can help your company close deals 67% better (marketo.com).
Aligning the two departments can help generate 209% more revenue from marketing (marketo.com).
B2B organizations with closely aligned sales and marketing activities achieve 24% faster three-year revenue growth and 27% faster three-year profit growth (siriusdecisions.com).
Companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate (aberdeen.com).
Companies with poor sales and marketing alignment experience a 4% decline in revenue (aberdeen.com).
Only 8% of companies have strong alignment between their sales and marketing departments (forrester.com).
46% of marketers with mature lead management processes have sales teams that follow up on more than 75% of leads generated by marketing (forrester.com).
76% of content marketers forget about sales enablement (hubspot.com).
79% of marketing leads never convert to sales. This is often due to a lack of lead nurturing (hubspot.com).
65% of sales reps say they can't find content to send to prospects (kapost.com).
60-70% of B2B content created is never used. In many cases, this is because the topic is irrelevant to the target buyer audience (contentmarketinginstitute.com).
47% more purchases result from nurtured leads than from non-maintained leads (annuitas.com).
B2B companies' inability to align sales and marketing teams with the right processes and technologies costs 10% or more of revenue per year (idc.com).
Companies with "dynamic, adaptive sales and marketing processes" have an average of 10% more salespeople meeting their quotas compared to other companies (csoinsights.com).
61% of B2B marketers route all leads directly to sales, but only 27% of those leads are qualified (marketingsherpa.com).
Only 56% of B2B companies verify valid business leads before forwarding them to sales (marketingsherpa.com).
50% of sales time is wasted on unproductive prospect acquisition (reachforce.com).
Sales reps ignore 50% of marketing leads (reachforce.com).
Outlook
Marketing and sales alignment is critical to improving the customer experience, saving costs and resources, and increasing revenue. Companies should ensure that marketing and sales are aligned by defining common goals, metrics, strategies and regular meetings, and using technology to realize seamless qualification and handoff of qualified leads to sales. It also creates what is ultimately a positive experience for the end customer.
When marketing and sales work together effectively, companies can achieve successful growth.
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