STRATEGY

Insights for Aligning Sales and Marketing in 2021

By Ascend Marketing

May 11, 2021 | STRATEGY

Organizations now have access to an abundance of data about their customers. The challenge is Marketing and Sales teams are overwhelmed with the data and are not utilizing it efficiently. Each team brings its own elements of value to its organization, but the key is aligning to maximize performance. LinkedIn reported that 90% of sales and marketing professionals agree that when initiatives and messages are aligned, the customer experience is positively impacted. Therefore, there is a critical need for further alignment between Sales and Marketing to enable business growth. A change management plan will help lead your sales and marketing teams through the transition and strategic alignment process.

What is Change Management?

In Sales and Marketing, change management will typically involve changes to processes, documentation, and roles and responsibilities. To facilitate successful change management in your organization requires the transition to be as smooth as possible for your sales and marketing teams. The most important piece to the change management process is your sales and marketing team members. You need to ensure they understand the changes they will be undergoing and how the changes will benefit their role and success.

Best practices for change management:

  • Creating a culture that is comfortable with change.
  • Continually communicating with team members.
  • Planning day-to-day activities during the transition.
  • Streamlining processes.
  • Involving team members in the change management process.

What are the Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment?

A customer-centric focused organization

Through Sales and Marketing collaboration, the two can work together to create accurate personas about your buyers. Each function captures its own information about the customer. Marketing captures insights and data from customers based on their behaviors and interactions with the organization’s digital platforms. Sales teams have more immediate and direct interactions with the customer. From these interactions, they can gather challenges and goals that are at the forefront of their organizations. By collecting and combining the data each team has gathered, your organization can gain a better understanding of who your customer is and how you can help them on their customer journey.

An overall well-defined strategy

Sales and Marketing often have different objectives in their day-to-day roles and typically evaluate their success through different metrics. This hyper-focus can cause tunnel vision for the two teams and lead to missed opportunities. Alignment of Sales and Marketing provides a clearer understanding of the other’s goals and allows them to support each other to reach their goals. Working together provides the opportunity to continually refine and focus their efforts toward a high-level business strategy for organizational growth. 

Better cross-functional engagement and support

By establishing and developing strong relationships between Marketing and Sales, a clear line of open communication is established between the two functions. Team members now feel more comfortable going outside of their departments and asking for cross-functional collaboration. By joining forces, Marketing and Sales can work together to design and launch campaigns that will turn over greater ROI for the organization. Setting up an interactive environment can lead to more support from business leaders at your organization. This support can drive organizational changes to stress the importance of collaboration in company-wide communication, and the dedication of resources to support these efforts.

The alignment of Marketing and Sales will enable sustainable growth for your organization.   

Keep Reading: Martech at the Intersection of Marketing & Sales

Interested in more content related to this topic? Dive deeper into Marketing & Sales alignment with an exploration of how martech and automation can strengthen the relationship between these two teams. 

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