A flawless customer experience is a make-or-break proposition today. Aligning your sales, marketing, and customer teams is now essential for long-term sales success. When these teams work closely, they can provide a seamless, consistent, and highly satisfactory customer journey—from initial awareness and consideration to purchase and ongoing support.
Marketing departments used to live in the world of branding and lead generation—with sales organizations operating in a silo with little to no contact with them. Customer service took the handoff from sales after the deal was closed.
Things have changed.
Buyers are spending more time researching online before they purchase. That doesn’t mean sellers are completely absent from the early buying stages, but it means it’s more important for sales and marketing to align on messaging, strategy, and tactics.
Prospects and customers have more control over who they see when purchasing products and services. Your company’s marketing can either help sales get a meeting or lose the buyer to your competition.
A strong alignment between sales and marketing improves overall performance. How effective your marketing department is can either make or break the chances your sellers have to get in front of the buyer.
Current research reveals just how critical it is for the customer success team to be included in this alignment as well.
Highly aligned companies grow ~20% annually and generate more than 200% additional value from their marketing efforts, while misalignment can cause a 10%+ hit to revenue each year, according to recent research.
4 Best Practices for Aligning Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success
Companies that align service and marketing programs around the customer improve customer satisfaction and allow their sellers to build trusted advisor relationships.
Shared goals, aligned metrics, consistent messaging, and integrated tools (like your CRM) are essential for harnessing these benefits. Misalignment not only hurts revenue; it also undermines customer experience and team morale.
This underscores the value of tight coordination not only between sales and marketing, but across the customer lifecycle. Companies that have sales, marketing, and service departments in sync have customers who are more loyal and spend more. Here are four best practices for aligning customer-facing teams.
1. Train All Teams on Your Organization’s Sales Process
A clearly defined sales process is your “operating system” that defines the buyer’s journey with your organization. It supports the tools, schedules, and procedures your team uses on a daily basis.
Training your marketing and customer success teams on the same sales process the sales team uses creates a common language that’s consistent with the way your people sell and the way your customers want to buy.
Providing sales training to your organization’s marketing and customer teams can benefit communication both internally and with the prospects you hope to turn into satisfied customers. When you get everyone speaking the same language, you replace confusion with efficiency and increased productivity.
2. Specify the Metrics That Matter
Agreeing on what defines a qualified lead has been an age-old debate between marketing and sales. Today, when marketing generates most leads, it’s crucial that both sides define the performance metrics and characteristics of a qualified lead and prospect.
Establish expectations and accountability for the quantity and quality of leads marketing generates for sales. The same goes for response times and closing ratios once the sales team receives those leads.
After the sale, customer service teams with firsthand knowledge of buyers can proactively address issues, foster loyalty, and even upsell or cross-sell opportunities. Setting metrics for renewals, referrals, and issue resolution helps sales and marketing stay informed about customer status and opportunities.
3. Meet and Communicate
Disciplined communication contributes to alignment. A regularly scheduled sales, marketing, and customer meeting is a straightforward way to get everyone on the same page. Use this time to get crystal clear on a campaign strategy and execution all teams agree on.
The most effective teams depend on the combined knowledge and insight of every department. Your sellers understand the organization’s ideal customer and what’s happening in the field. Customer success knows what resonates with current accounts. Marketing has the skills to articulate your message and branding.
An alignment meeting offers the chance for leaders from all three teams to determine the strategies and processes that best position your organization in the eyes of your prospects.
4. Create a Service-Level Agreement Between Customer-Facing Teams
It’s one thing to say you’ll align customer-facing teams; it’s another to actually implement the processes to make it happen. Make sure alignment is a priority among department leaders.
You want all three customer-facing teams to understand that their partnership is necessary to reach the shared goal of increased sales effectiveness and revenue. Develop a service-level agreement between teams to ensure accountability. With a formal contract, all customer-facing teams will understand expectations.
Benefits of Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service Alignment
At the end of the day, sales, marketing, and customer success play for the same team. Think of successful selling as a relay race. Regardless of who crosses the finish line with a win, there was a team behind them working together to move the baton forward. When the team is aligned, the finish line is that much easier to cross.
See how IMPACT Selling® aligns sales, marketing, and customer service with a consultative approach, standard process, and common language for success.
