The SMB Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment

Despite the benefits of such teamwork, however, sales and marketing teams are often at odds over who gets credit for a sale, the quality of leads, the way leads are distributed, and more. Such disorganization spells bad news for business: misalignment across sales and marketing costs businesses $1 trillion each year. Diminished sales efficiency and misdirected marketing efforts only make it harder to drive profits.

Things can get especially complicated in growing businesses, where individuals may work in both sales and marketing, and cross-team collaboration may be a new concept, or one that’s poorly-defined. In contrast, sales and marketing may have opposing ideas about what customers need and how to best target them.

The more we learn about the transformative power of marketing and sales alignment, the more widely its power is appreciated. According to recent research, well-aligned sales and marketing teams are:

• Proven to drive over 200% in revenue.
• A whopping 67% more effective at closing deals.
• Over two times more effective (58%) at retaining customers.

If those numbers sound intriguing, you’re in the right place. This guide is designed to help align the sales and marketing teams in your small and growing business to achieve greater organization, collaboration, and revenue. With the keys to alignment outlined in this guide, you’ll be on the path to more powerful customer relationships and more streamlined internal operations in no time.

The misalignment between sales and marketing is a result of long-standing communication issues that cause confusion and friction. Before marketing automation can bring the two departments together into one revenue generating machine, you need to align the two groups on the individual level.

Since any task with such a strong human element can get sticky quickly, we’ve laid out three areas for your sales and marketing departments to focus on: definitions, personas, and metrics.

Sales and marketing are often working towards the same metrics, but with very different ideas of what those metrics mean. Ask a sales rep and a marketer to define a marketing qualified lead, and you might find yourself with two very different answers.

A lack of common definitions between sales and marketing teams often results in a lot of finger pointing, especially when the pressure to generate revenue is on. This can get especially tricky for small businesses, who may be learning and shaping revenue goals for the first time.

Creating and agreeing to a common set of definitions eliminates the finger pointing and helps put sales and marketing on the same team. While there are dozens of elements floating between the two departments, focus on defining those directly related to your sales funnel.

As a start, work toward common definitions for the following:

• Leads 
• MQLs (Marketing-Qualified Leads) 
• SQLs (Sales-Qualified Leads) 
• Opportunities
• Customers

No matter the size or age of your business, a shared understanding of how you define success will get your sales and marketing efforts on the same page.

In many organizations, lead generation strategies are designed to favor leads developed by the sales team. Sales leads are believed to be warmer, with more detailed prospect records, because they have often been handled by the same sales rep since the beginning. In contrast, marketing leads are often seen as less valuable, since they haven’t involved a personal touchpoint.

Rather than quarreling about who has better leads, teams need to get clear on who they’re targeting — and what a qualified lead looks like. That way, there’s less emphasis on where it came from, and more energy directed toward guiding that lead down the funnel. After all, sales teams who work in alignment with marketing see 41% higher growth in reaching their quotas.

A great step toward sales and marketing alignment is creating a handful of personas that match your sales reps’ criteria for the perfect lead. CRM tools offer more transparency into the customer journey — and the touchpoints from both sales and marketing efforts — than ever before. This allows sales and marketing teams to not only realize the value of their sister departments’ contributions, but to support and nurture one another’s goals.

Sales reps spend their entire day speaking with prospects and have an excellent grasp on the types of prospects that are more likely to close. Developing personas is an easy way to agree upon the types of leads that should be developed, to increase close rates and raise the value of marketing-sourced leads.

Both teams have very different ideas of success. With each team possessing their own set of metrics, what could be a terrible quarter for sales might be a banner quarter for marketing. Since these two departments are both working toward the common goal of increased revenue, this juxtaposition should never happen.

It is important to mutually agree on success metrics for both teams. That includes:

• Revenue pipeline
• Revenue
• Leads generated
• Leads that become MQLs
• MQLs that become opportunities
• Opportunities that become customers

A win for sales should be a win for marketing, and vice versa. Communication is a crucial first step in the sales and marketing alignment process.

While it is a giant leap forward for the collaboration of the two departments, communication also lays the groundwork for marketing automation, which can bridge the gap even further. Read on to see just how marketing automation can bring sales and marketing together.

Technology is driving small business sales and marketing closer together. With more insight and transparency across both sales and marketing, the line between the two teams is starting to blur.

For small businesses with a polished communication strategy for the two functions, all that’s needed is marketing automation to turn sales and marketing into a cohesive, revenue-generating machine.

By standardizing and automating lead qualification, nurturing leads to a sales-ready state, and accurately reporting on the contributions of each effort, automation technology is the key to sales and marketing alignment. Let’s take a closer look:

For both sales and marketing, updating a prospect’s CRM data is a hassle. The tedium of adding notes and updating profiles quickly overshadows the value of a detailed prospect profile.
Marketing automation tools are able to pull in a tremendous amount of prospect information automatically, like your prospect’s company, social data, recent activity, and more.

This puts a wealth of information at your sales reps’ fingertips when they reach out to a lead. All of this data makes it easy for marketing automation to qualify your leads automatically based on how well they fit the ideal lead profiles mutually defined by your sales and marketing teams.

Up until this point, qualifying leads has been an inherently subjective process. Lead scoring and grading makes this process more concrete and effective, eliminating any disagreements over lead quality. Automating the qualification and lead assignment processes also frees up your sales and marketing teams to focus on their best leads, while placing unqualified leads on nurturing tracks that will educate and move them through the funnel.

Automating the qualification and lead assignment processes also frees up your sales and marketing teams to focus on their best leads.

Many small businesses make one fatal mistake: not continuing to market to their non-sales-ready leads. Leads that are not yet ready to purchase are either ignored or passed on to sales, which annoys sales reps and scares off prospects that might otherwise have been nurtured to a sales-ready state.

Sales and marketing alignment makes lead nurturing all the more effective. In fact, 95% of buyers choose to do business with a company that delivers relevant content at each stage of the buyer journey — proving just how effective lead nurturing can be.

Marketing automation tools allow small and growing businesses to nurture cooler leads automatically, freeing up your sales team to focus on the hotter ones while setting up a reliable stream of leads that are sales-ready. These leads can be added to drip campaigns that automatically email relevant offers and content based on user actions, preferences, or a set time period.

Lead nurturing campaigns can be managed by either sales or marketing, allowing the other side of the house to generate more leads or focus on closing more deals.

The biggest advantage of a marketing automation platform is that it puts sales and marketing on the same team. Marketing and sales can work from common definitions, toward common goals, measured by common metrics. Closed-loop reporting also increases visibility across the entire sales cycle, adding accountability to both the sales and marketing processes.

Marketing automation can identify the first touchpoint of a closed deal, making it possible to tie revenue to individual marketing campaigns. This allows marketers to see the real influence of their campaigns with a visibility that could previously only be dreamed of — and for sales to track their opportunities all the way through the sales funnel. Automation helps solidify the collaboration between sales and marketing with tested workflows and absolute clarity.

Although marketing is often viewed as a separate entity from sales, the truth is that marketing (and really every department) is tied to and dependent upon the success of sales. Aligning more closely with sales will increase the quality of leads available to sales reps, and will prevent leads from slipping through the cracks and getting picked up by competitors. For example, alignment ensures that sales reps are informed about current marketing campaigns.

The most common complaint cited by sales teams is that they can’t figure out what content to send, and 65% of reps face this struggle. Sales and marketing alignment can mitigate this challenge by ensuring that the sales rep can effectively engage with the prospect with the content, at the right time — rather than being left in the dark.

This all makes it easier for the sales team to close deals faster and more easily, which in turn drives the success of the entire company. In other words: any win for sales, is a win for marketing. This will increase the visibility, reputation, accountability, and authority of marketing within the company.

Sales has long been viewed as a relatively solitary position, with sales reps all competing for many of the same deals. In the past, marketing might have passed a lead to a sales rep from time to time, but sales often preferred tracking down their own leads.

Thanks to advancements in digital marketing and the advanced ways in which data is harnessed and applied, the marketing function has become an invaluable asset to sales teams. For sales teams, prospecting is no longer a solo act: instead, marketing has the expertise and reach required to find more qualified prospects in half the time.

Lack of prospect nurturing leads to 79% of marketing leads failing to convert. Therefore, sales teams have an immense opportunity to step in and take marketing leads to the next level. With sales and marketing alignment, sales can enjoy a steady stream of leads that meet the criteria they defined in collaboration with marketing.

This means closing more sales in less time, a more efficient sales funnel, shorter sales cycles, and ultimately, more revenue.

Technology is uniting sales and marketing teams on an unprecedented level, and intentionally aligning these functions is one of the most crucial initiatives a small business can undertake.

With proper communication between teams and the right marketing automation tool, sales and marketing can move from struggling rival functions to one cohesive, revenue-generating machine. Close more leads, lose fewer opportunities, speed up your sales cycle, and drive more revenue for your small business — all by putting marketing and sales on the same team.