Aligning sales and marketing can be a headache for leaders. Both departments serve a critical role in revenue generation, but have different methods. In order for these processes to align, the teams themselves must learn to communicate effectively and align on goals and objectives.
Marketing and sales both aim to generate revenue, but their roles differ. Marketing focuses on creating awareness and interest in a product or service, setting the stage for a potential sale. On the other hand, sales teams are responsible for closing the deal and converting leads into customers. As a result, the metrics tracked by these teams may vary, despite their shared objective of revenue generation.
Here’s an overview of the importance of sales and marketing alignment, as well as six actionable tips to help your teams achieve it.
The Importance of Sales and Marketing Alignment
When a product or service doesn’t meet expectations, it’s common to seek a solution. Instead of focusing solely on enhancing individual departments, leaders should also consider identifying any possible misalignments between them.
According to Harvard Business Review (HBR), companies often invest significant resources into enhancing their sales and marketing teams without realizing that the underlying issue lies in the misalignment between the two.
If sales and marketing aren’t on the same page, the following can occur:
- Unclear or conflicting messaging
- Unmet customer expectations
- Demotivated sales team
- Company resources wasted
- Unnecessary organizational friction
Aligning your team can help fix these problems, but despite this, approximately 90% of marketing and sales teams report misalignment.
6 Ways to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams
The intersection of sales and marketing is colloquially referred to as “Smarketing.” If these two teams work in silos, you’re missing out on significant opportunities for revenue growth.
Here are six tips to help these two teams align.
1. Facilitate Conversations
Establishing effective communication between sales and marketing teams is crucial for aligning their efforts. Without accessible interdepartmental communication channels, it becomes challenging for them to synchronize their goals and objectives.
In addition to offering communication channels, it’s crucial for leaders to foster an environment where sales and marketing teams are comfortable communicating with each other. This requires communication skills, as well as a psychologically safe environment.
An excellent way to improve communication between these departments is to facilitate conversations intended to improve their communication skills. Teamraderie’s LEGO experience is designed for this purpose, and is an excellent way to facilitate communication between departments.
Another important step of communication is learning how to ask better questions. Another Teamraderie experience, Asking Questions for Better Communication, can help your team learn how to accomplish this.
2. Build Connection and Trust
Communication is only one component of Smarketing—building trust is key.
A foundation of connection and trust can go a long way in ensuring the teams don’t just align, but stay aligned. Getting them on the same page is important, but if there’s no process in place to establish trust and open communication channels, they’re unlikely to stay aligned.
Teamraderie hosts a wide range of virtual experiences intended to build trust. For example, our beer tasting experience can provide a virtual happy hour for your teams, which is an excellent way for them to connect with one another.
3. Align on Goals and Metrics
Sales and marketing have similar end goals, but they use different metrics to measure their objectives. For example, while sales is primarily focused on revenue generation, marketing considers additional metrics such as attribution.
In order to enhance their effectiveness, it’s crucial for both teams to be aware of the metrics being tracked by the other department. For example, it’s often difficult to track the return on investment (ROI) of multichannel marketing, since many of these involve monitoring vanity metrics such as likes and shares.
These metrics hold significant value for marketing teams as they highlight word-of-mouth opportunities and the buyer’s journey. However, sales teams may not fully recognize their significance as their primary focus is on the final sale.
Our goal-setting experience, led by decorated Paralympic athlete Tatyana McFadden, is intended to help your team align on objective and set purposeful goals together. It’s a great way to bring these two teams together and align on the metrics that are most important to track.
4. Prioritize Content and Messaging
Content and messaging misalignment is a common issue faced by around 97% of marketing and sales teams. One instance of this is when marketing creates content without involving the sales team, while the sales team may create content that is overly focused on sales and fails to address customer needs.
Some of the common channels used by marketing include:
- Blog posts
- Advertisements
- Social media posts
- Emails
Whereas sales channels often include:
- Cold calls
- Emails
- Product demonstrations
- Conventions
Sales and marketing teams must prioritize maintaining consistent and cohesive communication with customers to avoid any confusion or inconsistency. It’s crucial for customers to perceive the company’s communication as seamless throughout their entire journey, from the initial contact to the final purchase.
Our NASCAR experience, led by NASCAR’s first pit crew coach, can help your team learn important collaboration skills and adopt flexibility mindsets. By applying the knowledge and insights gained from this experience, your team can ensure consistent and effective customer communication across various channels.
5. Align on Company Values
A great way to facilitate alignment is by identifying the areas in which your teams are already aligned. Company values are a great place to start. Your team likely already agrees with the company values—and if they don’t, they might not be the best fit for your organization to begin with.
Consider your company vision and mission statements. These preexisting areas of alignment can serve as a starting point for discussions about messaging, metrics, and other key areas of alignment.
If you’re hoping to improve your team’s performance, our values-based leadership experience is a great place to start. This specialized workshop caters to managers and leaders, equipping them with the knowledge to foster team improvement through shared values. It offers marketing and sales leaders an opportunity to enhance collaboration skills and identify common ground to drive team performance.
6: Emphasize Alignment During Your Next SKO
Sales kickoff events (SKOs) are excellent opportunities to make sure your sales and marketing teams are on the same page. These events provide opportunities to:
- Build team connection
- Learn new soft skills
- Brainstorm and innovate
- Bring your teams into alignment
- And more
A great way to facilitate this alignment is by prioritizing team building during your next SKO. The right experience can maximize the value of your gathering, while ensuring that your team grows closer together.
Bring Your Teams Into Alignment With Teamraderie
Team building is an excellent way to build bridges between sales and marketing.
Our extensive list of team building experiences provides a wide range of options to boost specific outcomes such as:
- Connection
- Collaboration
- Alignment
- Skills development
- Education
- And more
If you’re interested in learning more about how Teamraderie can help you improve your team’s performance or supercharge your next sales kickoff, consider checking out our 60+ experiences to find the one that works best for your team.
