10 Crucial Marketing & Sales Alignment Strategies Businesses Must Have To Profit

Marketing and sales alignment is a key driver in a successful customer acquisition strategy.

At iFoundries, we’ve always been passionate about coagulating our marketing and sales team to perform increasingly better in driving sales campaigns. In the last few years, we found our focus inevitably shifted to be on marketing and sales alignment predominantly as it helped us generate more and better leads and grew our business to profitability.

Our clients have also benefited from our processes and best practices.

However, Rome was not built in a day. Our marketing and sales alignment model took pruning, following actionable strategies that had to be repeatedly practiced and honed.

The key to business success is creating fluidity and impeccable communication between your marketing and sales team. We all have to duly remember that the buyer has changed, and their behavior will continue to evolve at a faster rate than it ever has.

Today, the buyer is in control of the sales process and is digitally empowered and connected to make the most informed decision. Marketing and sales have to be integrated today, to know more about our customers.

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Why Marketing and Sales Alignment Matters For Every Business

Marketing and Sales department do not have the best history. Most companies in Singapore have done no alignment between the two teams, causing massive profit loss and limiting the company’s revenue growth.

Misalignment significantly impacts revenue with lost sales and wasted marketing outlay costing companies $1 trillion a year. Furthermore, the lack of alignment leads to the waste of 60-70% of B2B content and a failure to convert 79% of marketing leads into sales.

Nearly half of marketing and sales professionals rate the main challenge as communication followed by broken or flawed processes (42%), use of different metrics (40%) and lack of accurate data on target accounts (39%).
-Digital Marketing Institute

Even though marketing and sales alignment is not a new concept, especially in an inbound organization, according to HubSpot’s 2018 State of Inbound Report, just 26% of respondents have a service level agreement (SLA) in place between marketing and sales.

Conversely, companies that get their marketing and sales team on the same page will generate more marketing revenue, and at the same time aid marketing and sales team to close deals better. Also, it is statistically proven that when companies align their marketing and sales strategy, high customer retention is achieved and overall productivity in business is achieved.

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10 Marketing and Sales Alignment Strategies That Are SMEs’ Gateway To Success

1. Establish guidelines for your lead qualification criteria

Admit it. Marketing and Sales teams have the most discontentment establishing lead qualification criteria. Teams cannot decide what are the characteristics that help to define a lead and which buying stage they are at.

Marketing and sales will argue which leads are “hot” or “cold”, and they will have differing opinions. Hence establishing criteria is a critical factor when aligning both teams. We advise companies to create well-researched buyer personas that depict your business’ ideal target audience and prospective customers. Both Marketing and Sales will then closely follow these personas to do their individual work but yet stay in the same loop.

In lead generation there are usually two stages of qualification, marketing qualified leads (MQL), and sales qualified leads (SQL). The first one is done by a team responsible for marketing activity. The sales qualification is done to confirm the information from a sales perspective.

The number of marketing and sales qualified leads should ideally coincide. If a sales department report that many leads are not qualified or of poor quality, your marketing qualification criteria need to improve. However in the case that marketing is able to justify their qualification, sales should explain properly why they reject the prospect in a closed feedback loop.

Conversely, many salespeople are reluctant to disqualify prospects, they want to work on as many leads as possible. However, marketing should assist them and help them improve on the quality of their leads instead of the quantity. This will help both teams save a lot of time, which is the most precious asset in a business. Poor prospects will result in wasted time and chances on prospects that are actually genuinely interested to buy.

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2. Create a service level agreement (SLA) to align expectations

One of the most critical steps to aligning your sales and marketing effor