The two teams essential for the successful operations of every company – sales and marketing – traditionally function as separate entities inside a business. Nevertheless, since they share a common ultimate goal, these two branches of business activities have found a way to merge into an entity often named S Marketing (Smarketing). By streamlining and aligning marketing with sales, your company will be given far better odd at completing the ultimate goal – improving your business performance. Movers Development helps you discover how.
Why is aligning marketing with sales important?
The misalignment of sales and marketing departments can easily cause many setbacks, regardless of your line of business. The ultimate issue, naturally, becomes wasting both time and resources as a result. Failing to align marketing strategy with sales objectives may lead to creating content that could never be used. This sort of issue occurs because topics remain irrelevant to the target crowd.
Additionally, most marketing leads fail to convert because consumer connections are not properly nurtured. Having both marketing and sales teams on the same page would imply a more efficient business strategy. Once a company achieves the alignment of sales and marketing, the sales cycle tends to get shorter and the conversion rates improve.
Problems that aligning marketing with sales will help you solve:
- The sales team not doing anything with the leads being sent to them.
- Aligning MY marketing strategy with OUR sales strategy
- Simplifying workflows.
- Increasing revenue and showing a clear marketing return of investment.
- Shortening the sales cycles and going to market faster and with more efficiency.
Tip 1 – Improve communication between the two teams
It is safe to say that streamlined and regular communication between marketing and sales teams is likely to help lead generation, but completing sales as well. The lack of effective communication may become the major cause of misalignment between these two teams.
Discussing issues and coming up with various manners of problem-solving play a major role in creating a successful business strategy. And the best way to achieve this would be by providing teams with regular opportunities to share thoughts and concerns with one another. The simplest tactic to make this possible is setting up regular meetings, but also encouraging sharing feedback between marketing and sales team members.
Tip 2 – Develop mutual goals
In order to achieve aligning marketing with sales to its full extent, a vital part of brand development strategies is to align the goals of these teams. Effective cooperation between sales and marketing teams can generate over 200% more revenue – aligning the goals of these two teams is one more step towards making this possible.
- Connect the data that marketing and sales analyze.
With common accountability, marketing and sales teams will rely on each other enough to create a more efficient environment for providing the target crowd with quality content.
Tip 3 – Get teams to spend quality time together
Although it is not strictly a corporate sort of strategy, offering chances for quality personal connections between the teams will likely help align their work in the long run. The time team members spend together will enable them to create stronger bonds and a better understanding of each other’s opinions on various matters.
There are numerous ways to improve intrapersonal connections among your employees. You may choose team-building activities that include excursions or start a simple staff sports event. Whichever solution you opt for, you will soon be able to witness the results first-hand.
Team members will start to feel more comfortable with their co-workers, which will result in smoother communication between the teams. Make sure members of your sales and marketing teams understand that they are not each others’ competition. Quite the contrary – they are supposed to be working towards reaching a common goal, which is to build a more prosperous business.
- Create a positive, stimulating, and fun environment for employees.
- Celebrate completed tasks and success as a company, without dividing departments.
Tip 4 – Enable easy collaboration between teams
In the end, successfully aligning sales and marketing teams means making it easy to do so. Streamlined communication and sharing between these teams imply that all resources should be accessible to all members of both teams at all times. The simplest, but also the most efficient way to achieve this would be by using cloud-based storage systems such as Google Drive. Platforms such as this one allow storing any business-related piece of information within reach of each and every member of both sales and marketing teams. Be sure to make this a part of your activities, whether you are creating a moving company business plan, or you deal with any other line of business.
Tip 5 – Join forces in reaching a satisfactory level of customer retention
As has already been mentioned, efficient Smarketing tactics will convert new leads into customers. However, the two teams can join forces in order to retain existing customers, as well. Attracting new clients may end up being over 5 times more expensive than retaining your current customers. This should be a clear signal to focus some of your marketing and sales joint efforts on making a profit from the clients that have already used your services or products and not lose your existing clients.
Aligning marketing with sales is an effective way to grow your business and achieve far better results than these two teams as separate departments would be able to do. Creating a Smarketing department provides an opportunity to optimize both marketing and sales strategies, retain customers, but grow new business opportunities as well.
