How to align sales and marketing teams

As I mentioned in a previous post, the nature of the B2B buying journey has changed.

Customers are more empowered to research your brand, engage with your content, and seek the opinions of peers and influencers without needing to interact with your sales team. As a result, they can move much further down the sales funnel before they need – or want – to engage with a salesperson. It also means the handover points – where the customer becomes the responsibility of sales rather than marketing – are starting to blur.

This new reality means sales and marketing must be continuously integrated throughout the entire lifecycle of a prospect – from lead to customer. Where there is misalignment between the two, the customer experience suffers and so too do conversion rates.

The alignment dividend
The payoff for getting this alignment right is substantial. Research has found the dividend from aligning sales and marketing can include:

• 30% lower customer acquisition costs
• 36% higher customer retention rates
• 20% lift in customer lifetime value
• 38% higher sales win rate
• 39% higher annual revenue growth
• 27% faster profit growth

So how can sales and marketing get on the same page?
There’s certainly no shortage of articles and research about the causes of sales and marketing mis-alignment. Having read many of them, I think I can safely distil the thousands of words down into four key problems:

• Marketing and sales often use different data sets
• Marketing and sales are often incentivised towards different outcomes
• Marketing and sales often view the customers through a different lens
• Marketing and sales often work in parallel, rather than in co-ordination

Bringing sales and marketing teams together
Getting sales and marketing teams is no easy fix. Unifying datasets and aligning incentives can be time consuming, resource intensive exercises. They can also be politically sensitive.

Getting the teams to work more collaboratively and respectfully together can be a good starting point and can be much easier to achieve.

Some of the practical things you can do to bring teams together include:

1. Joint sales calls/appointments
   That’s right, marketing should sit in on sales appointments. This is a great way to build a better understanding of how the appointment actually run and what sort of content and resources are useful. Being in front of an actual, real-life customer – the consumer of your content – can obviously provide valuable insights and inspiration.
2. Meet regularly
   In a previous role at a large insurer, the entire sales team – around 30 – would meet every Monday morning to reflect on the results of the previous week and talk about plans for the week ahead. Marketing and product would also attend every week. It was a fantastic forum to keep each other in the loop and build rapport.
3. Strategise and socialise together regularly
   Marketing should be involved in sales conferences and planning sessions. Not just presenting in a one-way conversation, but sticking around and getting involved in a two-way dialogue. Marketing and sales plans shouldn’t be developed in isolation, they should be developed together. And of course, the most useful conversations are those that take place at the drinks and dinners after these conferences, so ensure both teams are involved in these.
4. Physically locate the team together
   Actually sharing office space- the same corner or the same floor- can make a big difference. The water cooler convos and the instant feedback you can get from each other can be invaluable.

Creating aligned content
I have previously mentioned the alarming finding that two thirds of all content produced by B2B marketing teams doesn’t get used by sales. The thought of all those extensively researched and beautifully crafted, brochures, research reports, infographics, videos whitepapers, slide decks and other assets going to waste – because it doesn’t meet the needs of the sale team and/or the customer – really brings a tear to the eye. The time and the cost. Ouch!

But it doesn’t need to be that way.

The more time sales and marketing spend working together the more they are able to produce insight driven content that is fit for purpose. Improving response rates and reducing wastage provides a double boost to ROI.

The right content at the right stage of the funnel
Understanding what content works at each stage of the sales funnel is also critical.

At the top of the funnel (TOFU), customers are becoming aware of your brand and undertaking an initial journey of discovery. Short, sharp, easily consumed content, about your business and your category, is the name of the game here. That looks like:

• Blogs
• Articles
• Videos
• Infographics
• FAQs
• Social posts
• Podcasts
• Microsites

In the mid funnel – MOFU – prospects are undertaking a more detailed evaluation of you and comparing you with competitors. Longer-form thought leadership which establishes your credibility and authority in your chosen category is the way to go here. Such content has long shelf life and can help educate the customer. It is very ‘giving’ content. Sales teams love this kind of content – in digital form it can be used as a pipeline build, downloadable in exchange for an email address, in hard copy form it can be used at conferences and sales appointments.

Examples of this content include:

• eBooks
• Reports
• Whitepapers
• Tutorials
• Video ‘how to’ guides
• Targeted newsletters
• Case studies
• Fact sheets
• Email campaigns
• Blog posts
• Educational seminars/webinars

In the bottom of the funnel – BOFU – we get closer to the sale. Here, content designed to ‘nudge’ prospects into action is needed. This can look like:

• Testimonials
• Product demonstrations
• Pricing offers
• Sales collateral
• Customer reviews
• Product comparisons

Ensombl’s insight driven content – bringing brands, teams, and advisors together
At Ensombl, we use insights from our 8,500 strong advice community to produce content that supports our client’s TOFU and MOFU strategies. By basing content on the real life and current problems and challenges faced by advisors, this content is in essence co-created. As a result, it resonates more deeply and is far more responsive with advisors. Unsurprisingly, some of our podcasts have racked up more than 20,000 downloads. Since we launched the Ensombl podcast a decade ago, we’ve seen more than 800,000 downloads in total.

In working with our corporate partners, I can see the content we can create in this way not only brings brands and customers together, it also reinforces the credibility of marketing teams and the confidence of sales teams, in the process bringing the two together and creating that alignment dividend.