3 Amazing Benefits of Aligning your Sales & Marketing Teams

April 21, 2016

In a marketing landscape that’s focused on quality over quantity when it comes to securing leads, this is not an option: the sales and marketing departments need to be operating in perfect tandem. Endearingly nicknamed “SMarketing,” this workplace harmony offers a lot of benefits, such as syncing the quantifiable goals in each department, fostering communication and accountability, and promoting integration – and that’s just to name a few.

What you really care about, though, is how that translates into revenue, and rest assured, it does. Here are three of the genuinely amazing things that can happen with sales and marketing alignment.

The teams can combine knowledge to identify where the best leads come from and maximize those lead sources.

The closed-loop feedback system that’s created when the two departments work toward the same goal means transparency and communication are increased. So, instead of marketing simply handing off leads to sales and being done with it, they see the process through and are kept informed about the number of deals that close. This offers the opportunity for marketers to double back and see where the best leads were sourced from, thus pinpointing their most successful lead drivers. Going forward, they can make better use of these rock-star lead sources and use their new knowledge to improve the lead sources that aren’t performing as well. The sales department gets to reap the benefits: they’ll begin receiving better-quality leads, setting them up to close more deals, which means they’ll share more data with the marketing department, and an endless circuit of improvement is born.

Enough data can be gained to get a 360-view of the buying process.

Aside from providing insight about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to lead sources, the data-sharing loop can also help the marketing department to begin profiling their “ideal prospect” and the messaging that works best with such prospects. Predictive analytics are often used in the process of finding leads, which means that plenty of data about each lead’s behavior is collected.  So, when sales says that a lead has turned out to be a real MVP, marketing can go back and analyze the data of that targeted account and find out what they have in common with other highly productive accounts. Both teams can also revisit the content used to communicate with the leads and identify which key points are making the biggest impact. The more information that is shared between sales and marketing, the easier it gets to be able to see a good lead from a mile away, the more effective your messaging, and the better conversion rates will be.

Your sales cycle can be shortened and efficiency can be improved.

All the benefits of aligning sales and marketing culminate to produce higher revenue. When you learn which messaging and strategies knock it out of the park, you can really cut any deadweight, whether it be poorly-performing content or lead sources that are more trouble than they’re worth. The final result is that your pipeline becomes a well-oiled machine, shortening your sales cycle and giving you time to close more deals.

Although the importance of the relationship between sales and marketing is obvious, many companies fail when it comes to weaving them together. By now you should be sold on the fact that complete synchronization is the key to tightening up your sales cycle. Keeping everyone looped in from beginning to end only promotes knowledge sharing and sets off a circuit that maximizes wins and, in turn, revenue.

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