Sales and Marketing are like peanut butter and jelly: both great – and even better together. To promote and sell a business-to-business product or service effectively, these departments need to be pulling in the same direction. But it’s infamously difficult to create that level of coordination. Miscommunication, different goals, and separate workflows can create stress and slow down progress. That can add drag to your marketing strategy and harm your overall bottom line.
But if you’re in either one of these departments, you know that when upper management succeeds in removing those barriers, both teams can realize their full potential, together. That’s what we invited Mona Popilian-Yona, Marketing VP at binah.ai, to discuss on the Inspired Marketing podcast. With over thirty years of experience in Israel’s high-tech industry, Mona knows exactly how to encourage collaboration between marketing and sales. In this episode, she provides some tips on improving communication, aligning goals, and using marketing tactics and tools to drive revenue. From digital marketing campaigns to social media campaigns, Mona’s work centers on bringing sales and marketing together to hit collaborative targets and reinforce each other’s success.
Sales-Marketing Alignment: The Essential Ingredient
Aligning sales and marketing is critical for success. When these teams collaborate effectively on market planning and campaigns::
- Teams can share customer data, enabling more effective decisions on specifics (like product pricing), and the overall marketing strategy.
- Consistent messaging builds trust and loyalty amongst target audiences at every touchpoint.
- Optimized lead generation, through inbound marketing and other tactics, speeds up conversions with faster deal cycles, increasing sales.
- Your business stays agile amidst changing market conditions, outpacing competitors.
Overall, alignment leads to more revenue, faster growth, and better financial health, which benefits your products or services.
The exact opposite happens when there’s misalignment between sales and marketing teams. They miss opportunities and waste energy. Mistakes add up, sparking frustration all round. Deals fall through, and the lack of impact in marketing messaging is first in line for blame. At its worst, this can fuel a cycle of finger pointing which halts progress. That’s dangerous in any industry where speed and adaptability matter (which is virtually every B2B business in 2024).
Overcoming Obstacles to Getting Teams on the Same Page
If you’ve hit a hurdle getting your sales and marketing squads in sync before, you’re not alone. Many B2B tech companies, regardless of their size, face this very challenge. Let’s explore some of these common issues and learn from Mona’s suggestions for addressing them:
Conflicting Agendas and Viewpoints
Sales teams are laser-focused on hitting their targets and closing deals. But marketing folks work on raising brand profiles and pulling in leads through search engine optimization, email marketing, and other channels. This can lead to a mismatch in priorities, especially for small businesses with limited resources.
How to fix it: Encourage both sides to approach each other with empathy. Foster an environment where collaboration is valued over an “us vs. them” mindset.
Communication Gaps
When sales and marketing operate separately, vital insights from customers can get lost along the way—leading to missed chances and disjointed efforts that fail to capitalize on market research.
What helps: Set up regular check-ins every couple of weeks for sharing news, successes, or challenges. Use casual chat tools like Slack for quick exchanges. Get marketers involved in customer conversations when it fits so they gain more insight into what clients really need.
Inconsistent Messaging
When sales creates one set of messages while marketing drafts another, it often results in fragmented customer experiences that water down your brand’s impact and confuse your target audience.
The answer: Collaborate on developing messaging blueprints or toolkits; gather feedback from those selling daily so what you say truly resonates with actual clients by addressing pain points directly tied to industry-specific value propositions crafted together.
Goal Misalignment
If objectives are not clearly defined or performance is judged differently across departments working toward various goals, ambiguity may arise.
Solution strategy? Come together to set common goals and KPIs that are aligned with revenue. Establish explicit service-level agreements between the two units, with precise responsibilities and expected outputs. Use these frameworks as accountability anchors and track progress to ensure that everyone is moving in the same direction, with the goal of achieving the shared growth potential.
Effective Methods for Bringing Teams Together and Fueling Growth
With the usual business challenges in sight, let’s discuss some practical tactics you can implement to bring your teams closer to achieve tangible success:
1. Lean into a Data-Centric Strategy
- Use your CRM and marketing technology to track where leads come from, analyze customer patterns, and see how these actions affect revenue.
- Collaborate to define what constitutes a good lead for your company, and then adjust how you attract and nurture those leads based on that standard.
- Make it a habit to go over data together so that tactics are informed by real insights from your market research.
2. Partner Up on Content and Campaigns Early On
- Engage sales from the start in designing marketing content by leveraging on their understanding of possible client demands, difficulties, and concerns.
- Regularly seek feedback from sales on what resonates with potential customers and what needs to be changed. Consider content generation to be a continuous process.
- Create a strategy that addresses every stage of the buyer’s journey, from first awareness to final decision-making regarding your product or service.
3. Keep Communication Front-and-Center
- Set up frequent meetings and feedback channels so everyone stays connected and involved.
- Promote the exchange of insights and market news instantly via communication platforms like Slack or Teams.
- Encourage your marketing team to join sales calls or demos for firsthand exposure to client interactions.
4. Build an Environment Focused on Teamwork
- Highlight how interdependent sales and marketing are, one thrives through the other’s support.
- Create team spirit with shared goals around growing revenue instead of working in isolated groups.
- Acknowledge successes jointly while highlighting both teams’ roles in company announcements.
5. Put Effort Into Training Sessions
- Offer consistent training sessions keeping both sides informed about product details along with trends affecting them directly or indirectly within industry practices.
- Encourage cross-functional shadowing and ride-alongs to build empathy and understanding between teams.
- Invest in tools and technology that support collaboration and alignment, such as sales enablement platforms or revenue attribution software.
Conclusion
Bringing together your sales and marketing teams isn’t a quick cure but a journey that demands devotion, clear discussion, and ongoing tuning. By implementing the strategies we’ve covered, you can cultivate collaboration and propel remarkable achievements for your B2B technology company.
Keep in mind that leadership sets the tone for alignment. It is your responsibility as the leader to determine the direction, distribute resources wisely, and model the conduct you want to see in all of your teams. When you have the correct mindset, it’s easier to break down silos and find new approaches to reach your most ambitious revenue goals.
