Insights for Aligning Sales and Marketing in 2024

Organizations now have access to an abundance of data about their customers — so much so that Marketing and Sales teams are often overwhelmed with the data and may not be utilizing it efficiently. Each team brings value to the organization, but without alignment that value isn’t maximized. LinkedIn reported that 90% of sales and marketing professionals agree that when initiatives and messages are aligned, the customer experience is positively impacted. Therefore, silo busting is critical for business growth. A change management plan can help lead your sales and marketing teams through the strategic alignment process.
 

What is change management? 

In Sales and Marketing, change management will typically involve changes to processes, documentation, and roles and responsibilities. To facilitate change successfully the transition should be as reasonable and frictionless as possible for your sales and marketing teams. In order to buy in, they need to understand how proposed changes will benefit them and how quickly. 

Best practices for change management:

• • Creating a culture that is comfortable with change 
  • Continually communicating with team members 
  • Planning day-to-day activities during the transition 
  • Streamlining processes 
  • Involving team members in the change management process.

     

What are the benefits of sales and marketing alignment? 

A customer- focused organization: Through Sales and Marketing collaboration, the two can work together to create accurate personas about your buyers. Each function captures its own information about the customer. Marketing captures insights and data from customers based on their behaviors and interactions with the organization’s digital platforms. Sales teams often have more direct interactions with the customer from which they can glean insights on challenges and goals.  

By collecting and combining the data each team has gathered, your organization can gain a better understanding of who your ideal customer or account is and how you can guide them on their best journey. Often the process of defining lead scoring and lead management steps can bring the two groups into alignment.  

An overall well-defined strategy: Sales and Marketing often have different objectives in their day-to-day roles and typically evaluate their success through different metrics. This hyper-focus can cause rocky hand-offs and lead to missed opportunities. Alignment of Sales and Marketing metrics provides a clearer understanding of the other’s goals and allows them to support each other to reach their goals. Working together provides the opportunity to continually refine and focus efforts on a high-level strategy for organizational growth.  

Better cross-functional engagement and support:  Open communication is critical to establishing and developing strong relationships between Marketing and Sales. Team members should feel comfortable asking for cross-functional collaboration. By joining forces, Marketing and Sales can work together to design and launch campaigns that will support customer journeys and ultimately yield greater ROI.  

Lastly, leaders should support the interactive environment in order to drive organizational change. This means dedicating resources to change and constantly reinforcing the importance of collaboration in company-wide communications. In leading by example, organizational leaders will model the change required for sustainable growth.