There are more reasons than ever to align your sales and marketing teams. Making sure these two departments speak the same language and communicate regularly can help both be more effective and grow revenue.
Most salespeople agree: Customer conversations are difficult for a variety of reasons these days. Selling to multiple stakeholders means sellers have to influence more buyers and deals take longer. Some sellers also have to deliver bad news regarding order delays, product availability, and price increases.
It’s in times like these that salespeople need an ally to help them close deals and be more productive. That ally can be found in their very own marketing department. Here are three reasons you should align sales and marketing.
Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment
Sellers and marketers have different approaches to achieving the same objectives: retaining customers, generating revenue, and growing the company.
Marketers spend their time developing campaigns, researching target demographics, creating content, and analyzing data to understand customer behaviors. They don’t often speak to actual customers.
Salespeople, on the other hand, spend their time speaking with customers. They ask open-ended questions and listen actively to understand pain points, overcome objections, and answer questions to progress deals.
There is a proverb that says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” To get through uncertain economic times, sales and marketing have to start moving in the same direction, together.
Reason 1: Understand and Answer Customer Questions
If a salesperson wants to be seen as a strategic advisor to their customers, it’s imperative they bring more to the table than a strong knowledge of their own company and products. That’s where the marketing team can help.
Marketers are constantly researching the customers and industries they serve so they can better position their brand and product offering in the marketplace. Marketing applies what they learn to the collateral they develop, SEO tactics, presentation decks, and even the messaging and functionality of the company website.
Sharing those strategies and the raw data (for example, market observations and customer sentiment findings) with the sellers will equip them to ask customers better questions, so they can uncover their customers’ most pressing needs.
The point is to help customers find your company based on the questions they’re asking. When the sales organization knows what customers are searching for online (or downloading from your site), they can do a better job showing how your solutions solve the customers’ problems.
Data from Google or website analytics may also help salespeople prepare and position themselves for customer interactions. If the sales organization has a general idea of how customers interact with the company website—which pages they visit and which ones they don’t—they can better prepare for their next customer conversations.
Reason 2: Identify Customer Needs and Wants
No team is better suited to help marketing understand the company’s customers than the sales team. Salespeople are trained (especially if they learned IMPACT Selling®) to listen for relevant pain points. They can tell the marketing department the trends and questions they’re hearing during customer calls, visits, and interactions.
- What are customers talking about?
- What’s trending in the industry?
- What problems are customers trying to solve?
For example, sales can alert marketing that the value propositions mentioned on the company website are changing or becoming outdated. Price may be less important than it was six months ago, while on-time delivery has elevated in importance from “good to have” to “mission critical.”
When sales gives marketing regular feedback from customers, both departments can be confident they have the strongest marketing collateral possible.
Salespeople can also ensure their marketing team is using the same language and terminology that customers are using, and not confusing industry jargon (unless of course your customers use that jargon). Websites, forms, surveys, and emails all perform better when customers easily understand what’s being said.
Being highly relevant in the marketplace gives sales a competitive advantage. Effective marketing campaigns generate high-quality leads which progress to qualified prospects and larger deals that close faster.
Sales may also want to give the marketing team feedback about their campaigns. Yes, marketing can look at data for an idea of what’s working, but it’s hard to get specific feedback and actual customer stories when only looking at the numbers.
Reason 3: Stop Working in Silos
Most marketing jobs can be done remotely, and many workplaces have shifted to a hybrid environment. This doesn’t mean that sales and marketing should work in silos.
Each department should invite the other to their strategic meetings or set up a separate “smarketing” meeting to share information, suggest ideas for marketing content, and discuss its quarterly targets and goals.
It’s critical that marketers understand their company’s sales process and create marketing assets that align with that process. This gives the seller powerful sales tools that they understand how to use.
Sales and marketing can learn together. When both teams receive IMPACT Selling® training, they’ll speak a common language, see how their department goals align, and can support each other.
Contact The Brooks Group to find out how we can help align your customer-facing teams for a more effective workforce.
