Both marketing and sales teams are constantly striving to increase conversion, customer satisfaction and revenue, yet they don’t realise that the solution to smashing their targets lies within sales and marketing alignment.
When both teams are aligned to a common goal, communication and collaboration increases, with open ideation and knowledge-sharing making it easier for both teams to achieve their targets.
In this guide will explore how the two teams work together and the importance of sales and marketing alignment, while sharing tips and advice that will help improve marketing and sales team collaboration.
How marketing and sales work together
Since marketing and sales teams are responsible for the entire customer buying journey, it’s imperative for business performance that both teams work together to overcome core sales challenges to deliver a cohesive, engaging, customer experience.
It’s estimated that poor alignment between the two teams can lead to a loss of 10% annual revenue, while alignment can boost revenue rates by 34%. With sales and marketing alignment, not only does communication and efficiency increase, but collective ideation and sharing of insights will improve the effectiveness of future campaigns.
How to improve sales and marketing alignment
Is marketing and sales collaboration a key sales challenge within your organisation? Check out our top tips to improve sales and marketing alignment within your company.
Create KPIs and OKRs that align with each other
One of the best ways to align two teams is to give them common goals. With both sales and marketing working towards the same objectives, not only will their priorities be similar, but they’ll be more likely to speak to each other and book meetings on a daily or weekly basis.
Create customer personas
Customer personas are a great collaboration project for sales and marketing teams. Marketing teams understand who, when and where they should be targeting their messaging, while sales teams hold the detailed data around the customer. By tasking the teams with the project of building out customer personas, it’ll encourage collaboration as it will require a mixture of marketing research and CRM data. Plus, once they’re created, they’ll be a great resource to inform sales and marketing strategy.
Invest in a high-quality CRM
An advanced CRM solution such as Microsoft Dynamics 365, will unite and centralise your sales and marketing data, making it easier to spot opportunities within trends and analyse customer behaviour to improve engagement and personalisation across the customer journey.
Implement better internal communications
Whether you create a group chat or weekly Teams meeting, it’s important to create a place where both teams can give updates, share ideas and offer feedback to improve future sales and marketing performance.
Collaborate across content creation
When sales and marketing teams are disjointed so is the message you’re sending out to your customers. By working together with the same insights and shared expertise, sales and marketing teams will have joint responsibility of the customer journey, creating high-performing content that will offer a consistent message throughout.
Sales and marketing alignment best practices
To ensure you unlock the most productivity and effectiveness from sales and marketing alignment within your business, here are three steps that will inform best practice:
Instil a clear communication process
Whether your business mainly shares information over email, or you prefer to create team chats in apps like Microsoft Teams, make sure employees are aware of when and where they should be sending and receiving any cross-team communications.
Create space for regular updates
Weekly meetings or team newsletters are a great way to ensure both marketing and sales teams get into a rhythm or sharing the latest updates and insights with each other.
Share results and feedback
Regular feedback is the key to improving both marketing and sales performance. By getting into a routine of sharing customer insights from marketing campaigns and any feedback from sales calls, both teams can use this information to build on their current strategy.
Unlock sales and marketing collaboration with Dynamics 365
Both Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Sales offer a centralised view of real-time data, and support integration within your communication apps to boost insight and collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Discover how both platforms can transform your business alignment.