Sales and marketing alignment (aka ‘smarketing’ – I’m not making that up) is the holy grail in a business. Imagine a world where there is:
- A shared goal
- Marketing drives high quality inbound leads
- Sales spend their time nurturing and closing – instead of prospecting.
You shouldn’t have to imagine this because it ought to be a reality in your business. But, if this alignment has been missing, it’s more than possible to achieve and should be high on the agenda within every business. Why? Because data tells us that when these two departments truly come together – great things happen.
And by great things, I am of course talking about conversion rates and revenue.
- 32% increase in YoY revenue growth*
- 208% increase in marketing revenue**
- 38% increase in sales win rates***
Why should you align sales and marketing teams?
In the same way that with great power comes great responsibility – with great conversation comes great collaboration!
Like any meaningful and long-lasting relationship, there are several ways that you can bring the sales and marketing team together to increase the efficiency, workflow, collaboration and productivity of your team: sorry, let me just pick up all of the buzzwords I just dropped.
But in all seriousness, it is a POWERFUL business decision to take action that stops the two departments from working in silo, and we will cover these in more detail in upcoming posts. For now – we are focusing on some initial questions that should be asked to ensure that marketing leverage the knowledge and experience of the sales team.
This is a critical step in making sure that the targeting and messaging are right – laying the foundation to drive quality leads, raise brand awareness and perhaps most importantly – squeeze the MOST out of those precious marketing budgets – because every penny counts!
The purpose of the questions below are to allow the marketing team to get back to basics, challenge what they think they already know, as well as spot potential opportunities and solutions for barriers the sales team face.
These questions remind us that there is always time for:
- A reality check
- Some fresh and objective perspectives
23 questions to get sales and marketing alignment started
- Whose attention are you trying to attract to increase your business?
- Where do your leads come from currently?Where do the best leads come from? And the weakest leads?
- What does a strong lead look like? And a weak lead?
- To you, what makes a lead sales-ready?
- Describe the typical sales process from engagement through to close?
- How long does a typical sale take?
- How well known do you think you are in your markets/location?
- Is the decision maker in your target customer? What is the job title/titles?
- List three (or more) objections you hear from prospects. Are these similar across all products and/or solutions? Why are they so common? How do you overcome them? If not, how do they differ?
- What collateral could you use to overcome those objections?
- What questions do your prospects ask of you?
- What’s the hardest objection to overcome? Why do you think that is?
- List the key product/solution differentiators you have over your competitors? (This may differ from what your website/brand messaging suggests)
- What do your prospects think is the company’s best attribute?
- What frustrations do your prospects feel in doing their job? This might be different from decision maker to influencer.
- What are your competitors doing better than you?
- What are you doing better than your competitors?
- Is your website a valuable tool for you?
- What changes would you make to your website?
- How do your prospects find you? Or how do you find them?
- What do you think marketing could do better to support you?
- What marketing efforts have you seen from your competitors that you think we should be emulating?
- What does marketing do well?
These questions really do present the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the ways that sales and marketing teams can be brought together – but they are a great place to start. If you want to learn more about how our team can help your sales and marketing alignment – let’s have a great conversation ourselves, you can get in touch with us, here.
*Aberdeen Group Survey
**HubSpot
