While sales and marketing typically operate in separate silos, bringing them together through strategic sales and marketing alignment is one of the quickest ways to boost sales and improve customer retention. In fact, 73% of completely aligned teams report meeting their annual goals. In this article, we provide a step-by-step guide explaining how you can achieve this and why it is important. Plus, we give you sales alignment examples and tips on how to align sales and marketing teams.
What Is Sales and Marketing Alignment?
Sales and marketing alignment is the process of bridging the gap between the marketing funnel and sales pipeline to achieve common goals, such as a consistent customer experience and business growth. Having sales and marketing work closely ensures that you have a more effective overall marketing-to-sales customer journey.
1. Develop an Organizational Structure That Promotes Collaboration & Communication
Small businesses may not have a staff large enough to merit senior sales and marketing managers who can lead their respective teams and facilitate collaboration simultaneously. Your company may even have a one-person sales or marketing team. In that case, the most important step here is to ensure buy-in from the CEO, owner, or another leader to whom both sales and marketing teams report.
Additionally, cross-functional training can facilitate marketing and sales alignment. It creates a mutual understanding of the connections between the two departments, focusing on how sales and marketing work together to achieve revenue goals.
Follow our tips on sales team training to help you foster a high-performing team.
2. Establish Shared Goals
A sales team may have a goal of generating 300 new leads via outbound methods, while marketing aims for the same goal via inbound methods. But when aligning sales and marketing, the collective goal of increasing sales should be driven by a shared goal to generate 300 new leads together. This seemingly small difference is quite significant, as it reinforces the need to collaborate through every step of the process, including lead generation.
Though sales and marketing teams use different methods, each strategy should be informed by the other team. The sales team’s outbound strategies should incorporate the marketing team’s content. Likewise, the marketing team’s inbound strategies should incorporate the sales team’s in-depth product knowledge and experience with leads at the later stages of the sales process.
3. Create a Service Level Agreement
Shared sales goals are an essential part of sales and marketing collaboration, but they can create confusion and redundancy if the execution of these goals isn’t properly planned. This is where service level agreements (SLAs) come in. Below are the functions of the SLA:
- Serves as a contract between service providers and customers
- Serves as a tool for internally aligning sales and marketing strategies
- Outlines the expectations and responsibilities of each team, including deliverables and timelines
- Defines key metrics, like email open rates and social media engagement numbers
- Improves accountability among all team members, as it should be frequently consulted, particularly during sales and marketing meetings
Example:
Imagine a company needs to close 150 sales in the next quarter. An SLA between the sales and marketing team details the terms that make a lead qualified (e.g., the lead opens 75% of emails, has participated in a free webinar, and has expressed interest in an introductory call).
It stipulates the marketing team will deliver 100 qualified leads to the sales team by the end of each month, assuming a 50% conversion rate. Finally, it requires the sales team to provide a detailed report 30 days after receiving said leads, explaining how many sales were closed and any hiccups in the process.
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💡 Quick Tip:
Use a customer relationship management (CRM) system like HubSpot to help facilitate smooth collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. This platform offers tools for managing leads and proposals, as well as for creating landing pages and email marketing campaigns.
4. Communicate Often
Another key to how marketing and sales work together is facilitating frequent and intentional communication, including across teams. Below are some examples of information that could be shared both in and outside of meetings to improve the customer experience, as well as the likelihood of closing a sale.
Funnel Stage/Phase | Sales Team | Marketing Team |
|---|---|---|
Sales Pitch | Shares questions and concerns voiced by prospects | Creates content for sales to use that specifically addresses prospects’ questions |
Awareness | Use content recommended by marketing when introducing products and services while avoiding those that don’t land well | Shares which content resonates most with prospects |
Beginning of Alignment | Creates new product offerings more targeted to buyer interest, based on marketing recommendations, increasing the likelihood of conversion | Shares reasons why many prospects with the same buyer persona appear engaged but drop out |
End of Alignment | Shares information about which prospects choose not to buy, which prospects close, and why | Together with the sales team, uses shared data to refine the customer persona in the prospect research phase before beginning |
5. Invest in Tools to Make Sales & Marketing Alignment Easier
Certain types of sales software streamline the processes of gathering prospect data, converting them into regular customers, and rewarding team victories. This makes these software products key components of sales and marketing alignment best practices.
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems make collaboration between sales and marketing teams more convenient. This is because they organize customer contact information, automate sales and marketing tasks, enable frictionless communication with leads, and allow all team members to follow each lead through the sales process.
For example, in addition to sales-oriented CRM features for managing leads, deals, and proposals, HubSpot CRM offers marketing tools, including landing pages, web forms, email marketing, social media management, video hosting, and ad management. The platform also has a content management system for handling search engine optimization (SEO), content strategy, and website development.
HubSpot CRM deal tracking feature (Source: HubSpot)
Shared project management software is an excellent option for projects that require input from multiple people across the sales and marketing teams. Marketers, for instance, should be involved in developing sales materials as much as possible to ensure consistency in all communication. Likewise, the sellers’ perspective is invaluable for marketers who are connecting with prospects across multiple platforms.
Platforms like Trello and monday.com are highly acclaimed for usability and features that let users monitor tasks, share ideas, and organize project resources. There are also CRMs, such as Bitrix24, that offer project management features built into the system.
Trello project management template (Source: Trello)
An integral part of sales management involves motivating hard-working marketing and sales team members. In addition to allowing the user to build challenges between individuals and whole teams, sales gamification software product updates result in real-time and simplify the process of rewarding high performers.
SalesScreen, for example, integrates with many popular CRMs and allows users to build a customized gift shop on the platform. Coins rewarded to team members can then be used to purchase personalized gifts from the shop. Alternatively, Centrical encourages team development by rewarding users for engaging with (and becoming proficient in) training content. The platform also alerts leaders when a team member struggles to keep up with colleagues.
SalesScreen Reward Store for redeeming coins accumulated by team members (Source: SalesScreen Demo Center)
As mentioned, communication is key when it comes to sales and marketing alignment, and software can help in that aspect. For example, Slack is robust software that lets team members chat with one another instantly and on command—a must for successful alignment. Users can also create different channels to have separate conversations with smaller groups that may not be relevant to the whole.
Video conferencing software like Zoom is a must for face-to-face communication across teams. Team members attend from anywhere, and meetings can be recorded for those who can’t make it to the live session. Features including screen sharing, live messaging, polling, and breakout rooms create an even more collaborative environment.
Zoom Meetings video conferencing feature (Source: App Store)
How Do I Know if My Efforts to Align Sales & Marketing Are Working?
To accurately measure your business’ effectiveness in aligning sales and marketing, it’s best to turn to the numbers. Keep in mind that you need to gather baseline data from your pre-aligned processes to fully assess the impact on your business. Below are some of the key metrics you can track:
- Overall return on investment for an advertising campaign
- Cost per lead for content marketing projects
- Conversion rates of leads from one stage of the sales process to another
- Average time to pass a lead to the next stage
- Deal winning/closing rate for every lead generated
The purpose of understanding various percentages, averages, and totals is to see where you should focus your resources and where there might be functional gaps in the alignment. For example, let’s say you are running these four sales and marketing campaigns simultaneously:
- Cold calling 100 leads purchased for $300 from a lead generation company
- Sending email introductions to 50 leads purchased for $150 from a lead generation company
- A video webinar advertised on LinkedIn with a call to action (CTA) to submit a web form; webinar and advertising costs totaled $1,700 and produced 5,000 views
- A Google Ads campaign that will generate leads by having them download an industry report created by your business; the industry report and cost of advertising totaled $3,000 and produced 10,000 views
Now, imagine the cold calling campaign generated nine leads, the email introductions generated four leads, the video webinar generated 50 leads, and the online ad generated 200 leads. Based on this information, the following performance metrics were calculated:
- Cold calling: 9% lead generation rate and $33.33 cost per lead
- Email introduction: 8% lead generation rate with a per-lead cost of $37.50
- Video webinar: 1% lead generation rate and $34 cost per lead
- Online ad: 2% lead generation rate with a per-lead cost of $15
After assessing these performance metrics, you would likely have your sales team focus on cold calling over email, as it yielded a better conversion rate and lower cost per lead. To align the sales and marketing teams, communicate about any shifts in buyer persona that would require another set of leads. Additionally, the marketing team should review the cold calling scripts to ensure they include the same language and information being used in marketing campaigns and materials.
Key Benefits of Sales & Marketing Alignment + Statistics
Learning how to align sales and marketing doesn’t just sound like a noble goal for results-driven businesses. According to Pipeline360’s State of B2B Pipeline Growth 2024, while 75% of organizations report being aligned, sales and marketing alignment still ranks third among the top challenges businesses face. Still, its benefits speak for themselves. See its positive impacts on your business based on actual data.
Pipeline360’s data also shows that more than half (53%) of organizations with partial to no alignment report low effectiveness in reaching buyers. The constant communication and collaboration inherent to sales and marketing make it easy for revenue teams to track buyer behavior through the alignment cycle. In the process, businesses gain a deeper understanding of their customers. This knowledge then informs every part of the alignment cycle, from a more targeted sales pitch to a more likely close.
Every potential sale is jeopardized when the customer experience is sacrificed. This can occur through inconsistent messaging from sales and marketing teams, a misunderstanding of customer needs and desires, or a rushed sales process that doesn’t include enough nurturing. Data from Gartner shows that customer journey and customer retention are among the top areas impacted negatively by misalignment.
Conversely, prioritizing the customer experience through a sales and marketing alignment framework doesn’t just increase the likelihood of one sale, but it also turns one-time customers into long-term buyers.
The same Gartner study also shows that communication is the biggest challenge to aligning sales and marketing teams in an organization. That said, well-aligned teams can foster clearer communication and stronger relationships. However, with an open line of communication, the two teams can easily discuss strategies to refine their goals and lead generation tactics.
The study from Pipeline360 furthers this, stating how alignment has a huge positive impact on goal attainment. In fact, 67% of sales and marketing teams with significantly overlapping KPIs meet their annual goals. In contrast, only 36% of those with partial to no overlapping KPIs achieve the same.
Gartner also states that lead generation and sales cycle time are the areas most negatively impacted by misalignment. Collapsing the marketing funnel and sales pipeline into the collaborative alignment cycle helps reduce the number of unqualified leads in the sales process. It also makes it easier to convert qualified leads into paying customers—in less time and at a lower cost. When deals close faster, margins increase, and those well-nurtured prospects tend to spend more.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Though sales and marketing are leveraged to drive revenue, collaboration opportunities are often neglected. Aligning the two teams increases the effectiveness and efficiency of all revenue generation steps, including lead prospecting, creating awareness, delivering the sales pitch, and closing the deal.
Put simply, if sales and marketing are not aligned, your business will not be as successful or as profitable as it could be. First, there will be a considerable waste—of both time and money—in the sales process. Second, potential customers who may become frustrated because they’re not being heard will walk away or buy from a competitor. Finally, misaligned sales and marketing strategies can also lead to inconsistent customer communication and a less effective overall brand image.
While many of the tools we mentioned come with a subscription fee, some of the most critical sales and marketing alignment best practices are free. Start with an organizational structure that fosters communication and collaboration. Establish shared goals and clearly defined responsibilities for the sales and marketing teams, and work to achieve those goals as a collective unit. Consistently check in with your marketing team to see which strategies are working and which need to be improved.
HubSpot offers free courses that teach you how to align sales and marketing operations, including a HubSpot Sales Software Certification course. If you’re considering using HubSpot’s CRM to manage your sales process and to facilitate alignment between the sales and marketing teams, this course is a great way to get everyone on the same page quickly.
Bottom Line
Sales and marketing alignment is a key factor in separating high-growth businesses from their less successful counterparts. Following these steps, best practices, and software tools will create alignment between these two critical business functions. As a result, your business will experience a smoother sales process, more effective marketing campaigns, higher revenue, and explosive growth for your business.
