Sales and marketing. The ultimate interest-creating, revenue-generating, relationship-building power couple. The Beyonce and Jay-Z of business. The two business functions have plenty of similarities and differences, and one simply can’t exist without the other.
Sales and marketing are in a constant collaboration to attract, inform, engage, and convert prospects in the hopes of them becoming a customer. On top of that, they both do plenty of work for retaining existing customer relationships, like boosting engagement and improving the customer experience.
Sales and marketing are both business functions that focus on attracting new customers, increasing revenue, and building relationships. Sales refers to all activities that include selling your business’ solution, while marketing is the act of making people interested in it in the first place.
That common goal of enabling sales for organizational growth through revenue and customer relationship building is what makes that marriage between sales and marketing so functional. However, their day to day activities are going to apply more to their specific operation.
If you had two departments doing the same job, that would result in a lot of wasted time and energy. Sales and marketing both work to help organizations grow their customer base and increase revenue.
But to establish that collaborative relationship between sales and marketing, you must first understand the difference in the key functions of each department. These differences lie mostly in each team’s strategies, goals, and tools and resources.
Salespeople and marketers use different strategies and follow different processes to reach their goals and help the business achieve its goals.
For marketers, this will include creating and executing an effective marketing plan. Marketing plans typically follow these five steps:
After marketing has worked their magic in attracting potential customers, it’s time for the sales team to step up and move them through their sales process. Or depending on your business’ approach to customer acquisition, sales might be reeling in the leads.
Whatever the case may be, here’s what a typical sales process looks like, assuming the lead converts into a customer:
You can see that those two strategies have the same goal of acquiring new customers, but the approach is quite different.
The overall goal of sales and marketing departments is to close deals. But at a certain point, the torch is passed on to another team and sales and marketing can consider their job done. While no department can be considered successful without effectively fueling the business, sales and marketing still have goals that apply to their specific function.
The best way to differentiate sales and marketing goals is by examining the key performance indicators, or KPIs, against which they measure their efficiency.
Here are some KPIs that marketers will use to measure their performance:
Throughout their campaigns, marketers will measure these KPIs, along with other more specific marketing metrics to determine if their efforts were a success, failure, or work in progress. Marketing is an experiment heavy department, and it’s important to be consistent with the metrics you decide to focus on to be sure of a certain tactic’s effectiveness.
Sales, on the other hand, has some KPIs of their own, and some that coincide with those of marketing as well:
Sales reps and managers will measure their performance against these metrics to find areas in the sales strategy that need to be revamped or optimized.
Every B2B SaaS business is almost guaranteed to use some sort of digital collaboration software to streamline the process of working across multiple departments. However, there are some tools and resources that are more geared towards sales reps, and others that are more helpful for marketers.
Here are some tools that marketing teams will likely have in their arsenal:
As you can see, marketers rely heavily on software tools that automate the creation, execution and measuring of various forms of campaigns and materials.
And here are some software solutions that sales reps will use daily:
It’s important to note that while the software tools listed above are mostly used by the specified department, there will be circumstances that require access across teams. For example, your customer facing departments should all have access to your CRM to be as informed on customers as possible.
While the difference between the sales and marketing functions within your business is necessary to point out, what’s even more important is the topic of alignment. Sales and marketing rely on each other, and if the two departments aren’t on the same page, neither can do their part to reach their primary goal: to attract prospects and convert them into customers.
Below are the steps you must take to ensure sales and marketing alignment, growth, and success.
The best place to start with sales and marketing alignment is with one of your greatest assets: the customer. Creating strategies and processes for sales and marketing before taking the customer into account isn’t going to cut it anymore.
In a sea of competitors, one of the best ways to stand out is to build everything around your customer’s journey. And when it comes to aligning sales and marketing, the challenge that presents itself is consistency. There shouldn’t be one customer experience for inbound leads from marketing and another for outbound leads generated from sales outreach. Sure, the catalyst was different, but the experience shouldn’t. Starting from the awareness stage of the buyer journey, keep the path consistent across your entire brand.
Still focusing on the customer, to effectively advertise and sell your solution, sales and marketing need to establish a customer persona and stick to it. Without a clear picture of who you are trying to sell to, how can you expect to close the deal?
Marketers and sales reps might care more about different qualities of a persona, and that inconsistency can be harmful to the alignment. To be on the same page, the business needs to agree on a customer profile. This will take effort from both teams. Marketing knows who is attracted to or engaging with their materials, but sales knows who is actually converting and buying the solution.
Remember that as your business, industry, and solutions change, your customer persona will do the same. This audience should not be a static idea established after one sales and marketing alignment meeting. Instead, make it a constant conversation.
Earlier, different sales and marketing metrics were described to exemplify the difference between the two departments. But there was also some overlap. While each team will have their own definitions of what a successful day or project looks like, their common goal of growing the organization requires tracking some of the same KPIs.
To sync sales and marketing, find the common ground between what needs to happen for the alignment and relationship to be considered a success. Metrics they have in common are a good place to start, including revenue, customer lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, and even sales growth. With joint KPIs, sales and marketing can measure success of every stage of the sales funnel, allowing them to re-evaluate and optimize when needed.
Arguably the best way to evaluate the impact of your sales and marketing alignment is through customer feedback. This won’t include your typical feedback collection methods like asking for a review. Instead, your sales and customer service reps (because they do most of the customer communication) will pick up on pain points and things that motivated the customer to buy your solution.
With these new powerful insights, you can revamp your marketing messages and sales approach to appeal to that customer feedback as effectively as possible. You might even end up making changes to your actual product. That might seem drastic, but if you are going to alter your solution for one group, it should be your customers.
If you were promised a certain product feature to find out that it wasn’t actually a real offering, you’d be confused and maybe a little angry, right?
That’s the exact reason you need to be consistent with marketing messages and sales value demonstrations. You don’t want your customers to be confused about what you are offering, because that might result in them second guessing their decision to buy – or worse – feel lied to.
This is an area where sales and marketing desperately need to be aligned. When both departments have the same messaging in mind, marketing can effectively portray the benefits of your solution, and once the prospect meets with a sales rep, they can drive it home by reinforcing that message.
An important marketing function is to attract leads to pass along to sales. But their job most certainly does not end there. As reps are working with customers along their buyer journey, they’ll have questions, concerns, and comments. When handling these objections, reps will need content. That’s where marketing comes in.
An organization with aligned sales and marketing teams will result in two crucial benefits: the sales team can inform the marketers on the type of content customers are demanding, and marketers can show sales reps exactly how and when to use it. That communication will result in a much more effective and strategic content strategy for your business.
When people hear sales and marketing alignment, their first thought is likely surrounding attracting new leads and converting them into customers through collaboration. However, if done correctly, that positive effect on customer relationships can carry on to the last stage of the sales process: nourishment.
Plenty of effort needs to be made in new customers, but it’s important to remember that it’s a lot more expensive than retaining new ones. Once a new customer is acquired, focus on the relationship but altering your marketing messages to reflect their new stage in the sales pipeline. For example, you might suggest a new product, upgraded tools, or access to your customer support team.
Sales and marketing alignment is necessary for a successful organization. Not only can it offer more value to your customers, but it can help you nourish your relationships with them, bringing the value right back to you.
Content is an important part of the sales process, but only when executed correctly. Here’s how to create content that will enable sales.
Sales enablement software can make any cross-department alignment more efficient.
Mary Clare Novak is a Content Marketing Specialist at G2 based in Burlington, Vermont, where she is currently exploring topics related to sales and customer relationship management. In her free time, you can find her doing a crossword puzzle, listening to cover bands, or eating fish tacos. (she/her/hers)
Sales enablement software can make any cross-department alignment more efficient.
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