How to Ensure Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing are dependent upon one another. If your business is productive in terms of marketing, people will know about your brand and have the opportunity to become customers through the process of sales. The output of sales will act as a source of marketing and the cycle will continue. There will be difficulties and teething problems when bedding your sales and marketing departments. They both have their own skills, viewpoints, targets and short-term goals. And both need one-another to be performing well to do the job to the greatest potential.

It is also kind love-hate. There is a difference. And because of the demand on each other to be delivering, frustrations and misunderstandings can develop. But what is crucial and ultimately fundamental, if you can get both on the same page, with a coherence running through the system, the business will be in a far stronger situation to succeed, progress and grow – which is what all members of the team want. It secures your job, maintains your position and further to this, opens new doors to climb the ladder and earn more money from the business.

Sales members and business development representatives want leads. They want them consistently and with enough quality to not have to struggle to keep them in the funnel.

Marketers want their leads converted and the sales to generate. Therefore a compromise is needed. It is not realistic that marketers can produce the most ridiculously qualified leads all year round. Demand is often seasonal and dependent on numerous factors. But sales reps will want to see enough activity and creativity from campaigns to display that all is being done.

Likewise, marketers will appreciate full effort going into every single lead taking every chance to push them for conversion. What needs to happen is a blend of the department so that all are aware of the efforts being made as a whole to produce the needed results.

To make up your business alignment strategy, your sales and marketing department should take lessons from following points:

  1. Data – Data – Data

Data is important to both, sales and marketing. Let’s start with marketing. As a member of marketing division, you have limited budget, one which you cannot waste upon non-related consumers. You need to acquire data so that you can identify your core customers.

From obtained data, web analytics and business survey stats, you try spending your marketing budget on those people. The output you obtain from those people, in terms of sales, will tell you about pros and cons about your business product and marketing strategies.

Singlehandedly, data became the primary ingredient of a successful business.

Note: Data can also be connected through feedback of both, employees and customers.

  1. Emotional Connection

We are talking about lead generation. Every business is out there to make money but if you could create an emotional connection of a random stranger, one who doesn’t even fall in your active consumer group, indirectly you will create multiple consumers for your business.

Quoting the example of Unilever’s Ponds and mother care, both of these brands focus upon emotional connection, which make a person personally connected with a brand. Although the products of those brands are for females, but when they depict the concept of their product through indirect consumers (for example, a husband bringing mother care or a guy bringing ponds cream for his mom etc.), this creates a unique market for indirect customers, who won’t use the product themselves but will buy them.

  1. Conceptual Marketing and ROI

There are so many products of similar niches, to make people convince, you need to rely upon conceptual marketing and tell them the possibilities of doing wonders with your product.

To give direction to your conceptual marketing, make a SWOT analysis of your product and promote active discussions between marketing and sales group. Then, through the actions of science, reasoning and logic, try to convey conceptual marketing and realize the importance of your product and make people aware about what they are missing.

The conceptual marketing will help increase ROI, which will be a great success for your marketing team. In fact, instead of sales department, a marketing department will perform much better if responsibility of brining higher ROI falls upon their shoulders.

Nowadays, a lot of businesses have high marketing budget but they fail miserably because marketing team does not get enough ROI. With responsibility of bringing ROI to their doorstep, they will try level best to create engaging content – one which connects with people on a personal level. They will better do their job whereas, your business will earn profit.

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