When sales and marketing align, the entire business runs with united goals. For everyone to succeed, you must work together.
In a perfect world, businesses would run smoothly, team members would get along, and departments would communicate clearly on every possible intersecting project. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world, and businesses can sometimes reflect that. When sales and marketing departments are misaligned, it can cause inefficiencies, miscommunications, and a ding in profits of up to 10% annually.
When things work out, though, and sales and marketing come together to produce quality work, the entire business succeeds. A business that works seamlessly across departments is a business with its ducks in a row and profit on the horizon. This article will look briefly into how aligning your marketing and sales team can benefit your business and keep both teams better affiliated. With this information in hand, you’ll be on the right path to better all-around performance.
Know Your Customers Better
Half the work of selling is knowing who it is you’re selling to. When you understand your customers, you can anticipate their needs and interests, create content and products that fill those needs, and present it to them in a way they're most likely to engage with. Businesses know this and dedicate a lot of time and effort to researching their target audiences. But if this information isn't being shared across sales and marketing, it's not being put to its best use.
Sales and marketing both come with their own set of professional skills and wisdom, and thanks to their specialized pearls of wisdom, when both teams align, they can come up with more well-rounded impressions of the customer. With one half of the equation understanding what to sell and the other half understanding how best to sell it, your business succeeds from every angle.
As your brand approaches operations with this perspective, the customer and their brand experience take center stage. Rather than focusing solely on selling a certain number of goods and services, your brand becomes more human with a focus on the customer’s journey alongside your brand as you grow.
Follow Up on Leads Quicker
As the old saying goes, time is money, so time wasted is money lost. This is true across most business situations but possibly none so much as following up on a lead. Failing to follow up quickly is nearly guaranteed to lose a lead, as they'll be more likely to go to a competitor who catches them before you can. Having both sales and marketing aligned solves this issue.
When both teams align, marketing can handle the care and development needed to qualify leads, leaving sales open to come in and close a deal. Think of it as a game of volleyball. One teammate knocks the ball into the air, leaving it open for another to spike it across the net and score a point.
Not only does this translate to better sales outcomes, but it also means your business runs more efficiently. You'll spend less time trying to rope leads into making purchases, leaving you with extra time and money to spend on future marketing and product development. Compared to your competitors, you'll be miles ahead.
Customers Get What They Want
The combination of knowing your customers and being able to reach out to them more quickly has an added effect that extends beyond just your business and bottom line. The customer also benefits. When you're able to understand their needs and maintain clear lines of communication with them, you'll be better able to provide consumers with products customized to their needs.
Businesses always talk about how dedicated they are to producing the best products and services for their clients, but how exactly are they doing so? Without sales and marketing alignment, it isn't easy to pull off. With both teams working together, marketing can offer content relevant to the customer’s interests, and sales can then come in with services and goods designed to create a fully personalized customer experience.
How to Better Align Marketing and Sales
Since your business and your customers' experiences can both benefit from better-aligned marketing and sales, you might be asking yourself how to go about lining them up. It's as simple as a few small changes:
Communicate Openly – Hold regular meetings between both marketing and sales team members. The more that both teams meet to work together, the less of a wall there will be keeping them apart.
Set Joint Goals—Going forward, if marketing and sales are to work together, they'll find better success if they're working towards similar goals. At the beginning of the year, sales and marketing managers should come together to discuss how their joint efforts can help each other and the business as a whole, and craft goals to meet those ends.
Share Data Reports and Analysis—Transparency is crucial. The more both teams know what's going on with the other, the more prepared they'll be to address and resolve any potential setbacks. This starts with basic market research and extends all the way through to sales data and customer reviews. Automating these processes and providing login data to everyone involved simplifies transparency and integrates everyone into the procedure.
An Aligned Business Is a Happy Business
When people talk about successful businesses, they often compare them to well-
oiled machines - not too much oil, not too little. This metaphor makes sense
because a well-oiled machine runs smoothly as each part works seamlessly with the others to produce optimal power. Successful businesses run in the same way. Their separate teams work together to share data, improve customer experience, create
better goods and services, and eliminate inefficiencies and setbacks. While the teams
still maintain their individual duties, the business runs as a single, united organization with shared goals in mind.
To find out more about how you can better align your marketing and sales teams, contact Enidan Marketing today. We’re experienced and know exactly what your business needs to find success.
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