How to achieve sales and marketing alignment

Want to hear a terrible number? MarketingWeek researched the overlap between the audiences that marketing and sales targeted in 7,046 B2B companies, and the median result was… 16%.

Yes, the sales and marketing misalignment is bigger — and costing you more — than you think. 

Who is to blame? Spoiler: It’s not sales, and it’s not marketing. 

The three culprits are: unclear organizational structure, the poor division of roles and responsibilities, and the use of differing tools.

Though sales and marketing alignment is always a challenge, we will now tell you how to fix it with omnichannel strategy principles and turn two departments into one money-making machine.

Principle 1: Break down the responsibilities 

Setting up roles and responsibilities seems like an obvious no-brainer first step in any alignment, yet this has notoriously been a gray-zone-ridden battlefield in sales and marketing disputes. 

For example, marketing is always responsible for lead generation; however, marketing and sales are equally capable of setting appointments and nurturing leads.

Usually, these “gray zone” functions are the ones causing the most significant misalignment. When there’s no clarity about who is responsible, it inevitably leads to finger-pointing and mutual accusations. 

How marketing can help sales: 

• Generating highly likely-to-buy leads.
• Qualifying the leads and helping non-fit prospects self-disqualify early.
• Segmenting the pool and nurturing low-intent leads into high-intent leads.
• Using short-term account engagement tactics for the prioritized prospects.
• Booking meetings when there is a clear opportunity

How sales can help marketing:

• Building a feedback loop 
• Providing marketing ideas on educating prospects
• Improving market segmentation with field experience
• Giving intel on separating low-intent leads from high-intent leads
• Making sure that high-qualified, high-intent leads get routed to competent account executives (AEs)
• Keeping marketing up-to-date on customer insights to hone the “market-message fit.” 

Principle 2: Establish shared goals and metrics

There would be very little use for a football team in which every player tried to score a point themselves, right? Having a shared goal helps them perform best in their designated spots so that they can bask in the shared joy of the team’s victory.

The same goes for business processes. Giving the departments big, visible, shared goals beyond their numbers helps them grasp the bigger picture and play more in sync. 

Instead of focusing on disconnected departmental metrics, define shared goals. This approach motivates both teams to come together and achieve a common outcome.

Now, you may say that the marketing and sales departments couldn’t be equally responsible for all of that, and you’d be right. There must be only one department responsible for each stage, but you can set the necessary level of effort required from each department to reach each goal.

Principle 3: Unify customer engagement strategies

What is the North Star amongst the vast variety of abovementioned goals? A seamless customer journey. 

And to build that, you need a unified, customer-centric engagement strategy. 

You may have noticed that when marketing and sales take different approaches, it creates discomfort for prospects and results in lost deals.

To avoid this, you may want to utilize thorough user research and ICP analysis to comprehensively map the buyer’s journey. This map will outline how both teams should communicate with prospects at each stage and set the rules for consistent messaging.

Here’s how to lay out unified customer engagement strategies during the ICP creation and customer journey mapping stages:

1. Start with your ideal customer profile:

• Define your ICP beyond demographics: challenges, motivations, goals, preferred communication channels, and language.
• Document the ICP. 

2. Map the customer journey:

• Identify the stages (awareness, consideration, decision, retention, advocacy, and so on).
• Outline the touchpoints at each stage (website, social media, email, events, etc.).
• List customer needs at each stage: What information do they need? What are their concerns?

Example of a customer journey for Belkins’ clients

3. Unify engagement strategies:

• Tailor the messaging to address customers’ specific needs and concerns at each stage.
• Choose the channels where your audience should look for answers at a given stage.
• Maintain a consistent brand voice and stick to the same messaging across all channels and interactions.

Usually, early-stage engagement can focus on educational content from marketing, while sales are gradually introduced to more personalized, consultative interactions as the prospect progresses. However, this is not a must.

Depending on your product and business cycle, some of these strategies might work best for you: 

• Account-based marketing
• Omnichannel content marketing
• Re-engagement campaigns
• Gamification strategies
• Virtual communities
• Virtual customer engagement events 
• In-product video storytelling
• Interactive walkthroughs

But whatever engagement channels you are looking at, make it a rule of thumb to not just throw together a list of content ideas but instead make a list of problem statements like “Our deals are not progressing past 10%” or “We’re not getting any inbound leads.” Then, reverse engineer them into a list of promising solutions.

How this works at Belkins? We implement quarterly alignment checks to evaluate how well our sales and marketing strategies contribute to our overall business goals.

Principle 4: Build regular communication and feedback loops

Proper alignment is all about communication. Start with building a close allyship between the marketing and sales leaders. To make the communication more efficient, have the funnel reporting sorted and base all conversations on data. Data, dashboards, and insights will create mutual trust and add value. 

Tentative agenda for the weekly Marketing/BizDev session: 

• Review of shared goals and metrics
• Closed deals from last week
• Input from sales:
  • Product feedback loop
  • Content/collaterals feedback loop
• Input from marketing:
  • Events, sales signals, notable dates
  • New marketing assets

We recommend having these meetings as staples (depending on your teams’ experience and level of alignment, you can add to or reduce the list): 

Weekly:

• 30-60-minute 1:1 check-in between sales and marketing leaders
• 30-minute Marketing/BizDev session
• The marketing leader’s alignment with AM’s key account updates

Monthly: 

• Marketing team metrics review (sales department not included)
• 10-minute update from marketing to the whole leadership team with high-level updates and strategy
• Must-have tools for successful communication: 
• Data (from CRM, Google Analytics, and marketing automation platforms)
• Funnel reporting (tools like Funnel.io or Google Looker Studio help visualize the customer journey, identify bottlenecks, and track conversion rates at each stage)
• Shared dashboards (build custom dashboards in tools like Tableau, Power BI, or Google Looker Studio)
• Cross-departmental open communication channels (Slack, Asana, Trello — whatever you use already and is comfortable for all)

Achieving sales and marketing alignment step-by-step

A large part of the difference between success and failure in sales is having leads with a high propensity to buy. Being able to say, “I see you downloaded our case studies for enterprises like {{YourCompany}}. I’m assuming you’re not sitting around and reading it for fun, so I have to ask — why?” is far better than cold prospecting.

If you have a good product with a proven product-market fit, you can align sales and marketing efforts and optimize spending: 

1. Change your mindset about marketing. Marketing's primary function should be to educate and help prospects develop awareness, demand, and a preference for your business. This task is very different from getting people to give away their email addresses. The secondary function should be to help non-fit prospects disqualify themselves early, for which the sales team will be thankful.
2. Agree on the exact leads you want. You’re probably clear on this already, but what about your organization? Sift out the low-intent MQLs who don’t want to buy and will only cause headaches and incur costs if taken into the sales process. Instead, get as many high-intent leads as possible.
3. Straighten up messaging and product positioning. Ensure that your marketing messaging delivers message-market fit, i.e., speaks to the ideal client’s pain points in their language. 
4. Define shared goals for marketing and sales. Stop bringing in ‘just any’ MQL — instead, encourage bringing in enough highly qualified leads with a high propensity to buy. Look for leads with self-declared buying intent. As stated above, tie the goals to maximizing sales opportunities, pipeline volume, and revenue.
5. Eliminate activities generating low-intent leads. Content syndication and lead-gen magnet ads do little for the bottom line. Shift the budget to invest in more effective tools: high-value, educational content and customer-friendly distribution, such as organic social media, paid sponsor posts with guaranteed views, podcasts, industry influencers, etc.

Creating educational content is not easy, but having true insight into your audience’s mindset helps a lot. By knowing their trouble, you can involve an expert on the subject to give advice. For instance, imagine a former Fortune 500 CFO informing your marketing content if your target audience is Fortune 500 CFOs. Get this level of expertise, wrap it, and publish it widely, and people will turn to you.

6. Optimize the remaining activities. Effective high-intent lead-generating stuff can be optimized, too. For example, in paid search, it is better to bid on specific, high-intent search terms (“CRM pricing”) instead of broad, low-intent search terms (“CRM software”). Boost your webinars by inviting B2B influencers, implement a referral program if you have good client retention rates, etc. 
7. Optimize the buying experience. If you do all of the above, lead volume will drop off a cliff, but that’s good — less junk in the system. Now, you can work on the remaining high-intent leads properly. Route these people to competent AEs, ensure that they get all the info they need, remove wait times, and make buying easy overall.

Let’s align now!

In B2B sales, it boils down to this: marketing needs to generate curiosity and credibility; sales need to use these things to close. To make it work, sales and marketing should speak to the same people. 

Mapping out the customer journey, building omnichannel engagement strategies, and embracing collaboration protocols help create a customer-centered system, where sales and marketing departments consistently speak to the right people with the right messaging. This drives superior customer experiences and higher revenue numbers, making everyone happier.  

While you’re busy aligning your sales and marketing, don’t hesitate to contact Belkins for a boost in lead generation and sales appointments for your company. Our clients start seeing results in as little as two months.