Cogo Strategy Blog

As the economy faces hard times, many businesses are looking for new ways to reach customers. In 2022, global demand for digital marketing was worth about $321 billion. Experts are also predicting a rapid growth rate of more than 13% per year on average until 2028 or later.

However, investing money in a big marketing campaign may not be effective if you don't know how to achieve sales and marketing alignment. What can seem like a huge marketing success on paper may turn out to produce no real business growth or new customers.

On the other hand, when sales and marketing teams work together, growth sometimes seems to take care of itself. So how can you get your sales and marketing teams to work together with maximum efficiency? Read on to learn all about the top tips for achieving sales and marketing alignment!

1. Get Your Teams on the Same Page

When two different teams struggle to work together, it can feel impossible to figure out how to align them. However, you can often achieve progress toward alignment by helping your sales and marketing teams talk to each other. Done the right way, this will give your teams the opportunity to work through their differences on their own and come to a more unified position.

However, without the right context, your sales and marketing teams may not get much use out of their discussions. You need to provide a common context for your sales and marketing teams so that they can think in common terms.

One of the best ways to do this is to have both of your teams write down their own definitions for some of the most important terms they work with. This can even include terms that seem self-evident, like what exactly a lead is.

Start by asking each of your teams to write down some of the most common or important words they deal with. It might help to have them imagine that they are explaining their team goals to someone who does not know much about what they do.

Once both of your teams have created a list of words, compare both lists and combine them. Then, ask your sales and marketing teams to write down a definition for each of the words on your shared list.

With that done, you might discover that your teams have surprising differences when it comes to how they think about certain common words. You can proceed by helping each team understand the perspective of the other.

Then, you can bring them together and help them come up with shared definitions for some of the terms that they had different definitions for before.

2. Set Goals for Sales and Marketing Alignment

All of this can help your sales and marketing team create a clearer shared picture of where they are and where they are trying to go. However, there's still a good chance that your sales and marketing teams will focus on different priorities.

Now that your two teams have a shared perspective, you can deepen that unity by providing them with shared goals. Consider sitting down with some of your top team members from your sales and marketing teams and asking them to help you come up with goals that would be helpful for them both to aim at together. On the other hand, depending on your situation, it might be obvious what kind of goals you need your sales and marketing teams to start working on.

Keep in mind that having unified goals is valuable all by itself. You don't need to ask your sales and marketing teams to work on unification at the same time they are trying to take their performance to the next level.

Consider setting goals that are relatively easy for your sales and marketing teams to reach. That way, their main focus will be on working out their differences and coming to a shared understanding. Once you have that, you can set higher goals and enjoy the incredible power of synergy and teamwork!

3. Improve Alignment With Efficient Communication

As your sales and marketing teams start working together, they will need information from each other to reach their decisions. If they use slow communication processes, that can cause each team to slow the other down. That can lead to resentment that will erode the growing unity you are establishing between your teams.

As you get your sales and marketing teams to start working together, make sure that they have a communication system in place that allows for quick back and forth.

You might want to assign someone from each of these teams to check for messages from the other team and bring them to the attention of whoever should respond to them. On the other hand, you might simply need to emphasize to your team members that they should have message notifications on and be ready to respond quickly to incoming messages from the other team.

4. Compromise About Lead Quality

In many ways, your marketing strategy should be aimed at creating leads for your sales team. At this point, your sales and marketing teams should have a clear understanding of what a lead is. However, they may have differences of opinion about what makes a lead better or worse.

Consider asking each of your teams to write down the qualities that they think matter most when it comes to lead quality. Then, focus on helping each team understand the other's perspective.

After that, you can bring your teams together again and help them come to a shared understanding of what will count as a quality lead for the immediate future.

In this situation, it is often a good idea to take input from both teams. Although the sales team knows more about which kinds of leads lead to sales, your marketing team will know more about which kinds of leads are more efficient to acquire.

5. Boost Sales With Marketing Tools

Once your teams are starting to work together, try to find specific ways that each team can help the other. For example, you can ask your marketing team to come up with powerful content that can help your sales team convince potential customers to become actual customers.

You might want to get a lot of input from your sales team as you figure out what kind of content your marketing team should create.

6. Use Sales Insights for Marketing Campaigns

On the other hand, your sales team will have a lot of contact with customers, giving them insight into what your marketing team should focus on. Ask your sales team to start taking notice of any insights they get from their sales meetings that might be helpful for the marketing team.

Have them start writing these insights down so that you can review them later. You might also ask your marketing team to produce a list of questions they would like answered. Then, you can provide some of those questions to your sales team to help them know what to pay attention to while they speak with customers.

If you can get each of your teams to do something for the other that they cannot do for themselves, that can go a long way toward creating unity.

7. Analyze Each Step in Your Sales Funnel

Help your marketing team understand your sales funnel. This will give them a better sense of which kind of leads they should be trying to generate. In fact, it can be helpful to have both of your teams walk through your sales funnel step by step.

Ask both teams to comment on what might lead to greater success at each step. If it seems appropriate, you can also ask your teams to talk about what is most difficult for them.

That can include a step in the sales funnel that your sales team often struggles with. It could also include a type of lead that your marketing team struggles to generate.

8. Set up Joint Events for Sales and Marketing

Look for opportunities to get your sales and marketing teams to work together in other contexts. You can have them attend events together that they might normally attend alone. You can also schedule business meetings for both teams to attend to help them coordinate.

It might even be a good idea to schedule some social events during work hours that both teams can enjoy together.

There are many aspects of unity that contribute to alignment between your sales and marketing departments. As you try different things out, ask for feedback from both teams about which kinds of meetings they get the most out of.

Know How to Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment

Although figuring out how to achieve sales and marketing alignment is not always easy, it can provide incredible returns. The better your sales and marketing teams work together, the more you can rely on them to take care of growing your customer base. That can free up time for you to consider creative strategies for taking your total business success to the next level.

At Cogo and Co., we provide strategic collaboration and end-to-end marketing support. To learn more about how you can find the best marketing solutions assistance for your business needs, contact us here at any time!