The dynamics between marketing and sales have historically been closely-tied and wildly different. At a basic level, marketing teams manage promotional tactics while sales teams fundamentally warm leads and close deals. Together, they go in hand-in-hand to drive business for their company and impact the bottom line.
Despite some distinct differences between the two departments, marketing and sales should be strongly aligned with goals, projects, and analytics. Yet, when a business looks at their marketing and sales teams, they often find this to be far from the truth. The key to bringing these two together is developing a strategy that creates strong interdependence to optimize success.
Different Departments, Same Goal
In our previous blog, we outlined the clear differences between marketing and sales teams. And while these differences exist in many companies, it’s important to empower both sides to work together cohesively in order to generate success in both departments.
According to HubSpot, 87 percent of the terms that sales and marketing teams use to describe each other are negative. This can only be counterproductive for creating a strong alignment. Marketing has been known to refer to sales as simple-minded, incompetent, and laze. Meanwhile, sales use terms like “arts and crafts” and “irrelevant” to describe marketing.
However, this could not be further from the truth. Without the support of marketing, sales teams would not be able to get the warm leads they need to quickly close a sale. Without a solid sales team, marketing would not have on-the-ground insights from specific markets to create relevant content.
Marketing and Sales Feedback Loop
The key to marketing and sales alignment is developing an interconnected strategy that creates a feedback loop. Marketing teams do heavy market research on a company’s target personas to understand the demographics, lifestyle, and behavior of their ideal customer. All information created and used to sell to the customer should reflect their specific interests, pain points, and concerns. Without this detailed research, both teams struggle to accurately target the right lead. While sales can use this information to better address their customer, their team receives feedback from regional markets that may differ slightly from the more generalized personas that marketing created. This regional-specific information is vital for marketers to better understand their audience.
This is just one way that a feedback loop is essential to seeing positive communication and successful campaigns for sales and marketing. The feedback loop is where both teams communicate in a continuous loop, providing back-and-forth communication and adapting their approaches based on this feedback. To ensure communication, the teams need to meet regularly through onboarding, weekly sales, and management meetings to review goals and analytics.
A great practice to ensure this feedback loop stays strong is to incorporate marketing and sales alignment into the company’s culture and processes. Therefore leadership and managers need to reiterate that neither sales nor marketing is king of the mountain. Rather, they are both pivotal generals in the company. Ensuring there is an equilibrium between salaries of lateral sales and marketing roles will help the mentality.
Finding Harmony Through HubSpot
In order to foster marketing and sales alignment, it is important to embrace the tools that make this possible. Meetings are a great way to stay on track but they aren’t enough to ensure your teams are in sync.
Marketing automation tools like HubSpot are built to blend marketing and sales teams into one well-oiled machine. HubSpot coins the term Smarketing, which refers to marketing and sales alignment created through frequent and direct communication.
Companies that practice Smarketing ensure two departments have one goal and established measurements to achieve that goal. Make goals together and review them frequently.
For instance, 74 percent of organizations that use marketing automation and CRM said their sales and marketing teams are aligned, according to DemandGen.
As the lines blur between marketing and sales, it’s crucial to empower both teams to be experts in their field. HubSpot separates its software into a Marketing Dashboard (complete with analytics, blog performance, and content creation tools), and a Sales Dashboard (highlighting deal forecasts, sales performance, and prospect tracking). HubSpot brings the two together while amplifying each with their own productivity tools.
HubSpot’s tracking allows marketing and sales to determine when a lead visited a website, how long they were there, and what they searched for. Not to mention its ability to create complex workflows for email nurturing to ensure no lead goes unnoticed. This gives both teams more information to do their job better and convert the lead into a customer.
Marketing and Sales Alignment
As a HubSpot Certified Agency, we practice what we preach. We combine sales and marketing efforts to drive traffic, warm leads, and send a potential customer down the buyer’s journey. Through marketing and sales alignment, we are able to drive results and ensure success for our customers and our agency.
