Gone are the days when the marketing and sales departments worked in silos. Faced with today's fierce competition, companies are increasingly focused on potential internal issues that could negatively impact their conversion rates. Misalignment between marketing and sales teams is one of the most common.
Why choose Smarketing ?
Before discussing common mistakes that impact the coordination of your sales and marketing teams, let's explore the importance of marketing and sales alignment . In principle, company revenue increases when marketing and sales teams are in sync. The sales cycle is shortened, and conversion rates are more optimal.
Smarketing also offers you the opportunity to:
- better target and define your company's buyer personas
- outpace your competitors;
- follow a clear and precise strategy;
- increase the revenue generated by the brand;
- to offer complete customer satisfaction.
It turns out that B2B companies that respond immediately are seven times more likely to engage with decision-makers. The challenge now is to align marketing and sales teams and implement a successful Smarketing strategy. To do this, you need to:
- define a common language that the marketing and sales teams will need to become familiar with;
- agree on the type of buyer personas ;
- establish a lead scoring system ;
- determine the objectives to be achieved and the common KPIs;
- develop relevant and sustainable content strategies;
- to define everyone's tasks;
- adopt a set of innovative tools and technologies;
- draw up a Smarketing SLA or Service Level Agreement.
After implementing the Smarketing , you need to coordinate your teams to apply it effectively and generate more sales.
1) Neglecting meetings between the two teams: marketing and sales
In Smarketing, communication is key to ensuring proper alignment between the two teams. Failing to schedule regular meetings would therefore be a mistake. Through Smarketing meetings, marketers can monitor the sales team's progress toward revenue targets. This also allows them to develop new solutions as needed. Ideally, weekly meetings to discuss processes, resources, and ongoing campaigns
2) Do not communicate
If you want to keep your marketing and sales teams aligned, it's essential to review ongoing activities and operations . You can create team email aliases to share information relevant to both departments. You can also share your editorial calendar with sales representatives to keep them informed about current promotions. Additionally, you can share reports and analyses to boost team morale. Choose the option that best suits your needs to facilitate communication between your company's marketing and sales teams
3) Failing to consider the importance of feedback loops
Feedback loops simplify communication between company teams. This allows you to quickly find solutions to problems that arise. In addition to coordinating your marketing teams, these loops enable you to:
- share customer feedback and identify weaknesses throughout the purchasing process;
- publish relevant content to attract more customers at each stage of the sales process;
- define the type of content to create to support your sales representatives in the sales enablement strategy.
How to set up feedback loops? You can simply exchange ideas during weekly Smarketing and by sharing a Google Sheet to collect ideas and comments/opinions left by your company's customers.
4) Do not integrate salespeople into the content strategy
Keep in mind that Smarketing alignment is the process of coordinating the company's marketing and sales teams. It would therefore be pointless if you didn't take care to integrate the sales team into the content strategy. Contrary to what one might think, content content marketing professionals . Salespeople also possess knowledge that can contribute to optimizing the quality of your content. Make sure you leverage this area effectively!
You can interview them, create a Smarketing podcast your company's social selling strategy
5) Not integrating the marketing team into the sales strategy
Secondly, you need to ensure that your marketers understand how salespeople sell your company's products/services
To ensure the success of their sales initiation, invite your marketers to:
- listen to the salesperson's telephone conversations with clients;
- observe the email exchanges between the salesperson and the client;
- to contribute to the product demonstration.
In principle, integrating marketers into sales strategies is a way to give them more ideas for content creation. It's also an effective way to optimize the company's lead nurturing /sales enablement
Forgetting to evaluate and adjust your teams is also a common mistake to avoid, at the risk of desynchronizing the company's marketing and sales teams.
Also, never underestimate the importance of these meetings to maintain close ties between your two teams. They will be able to get to know each other better and work together to adopt the best Smarketing strategy. The goal is to significantly increase lead generation and boost your company's sales.
