The challenge of sales and marketing alignment
Despite the many benefits of sales and marketing alignment, CMOs often struggle with getting their team to work collaboratively with sales. The most common challenges to marketing and sales alignment include:
- Poor communication: Communication is fundamental to driving alignment. Differences in terminology, lack of regular meetings, and limited feedback create gaps that lead to misunderstandings, inefficiencies, and delays.
- Data silos: Collaboration suffers when information lives in separate systems. To do their jobs well, sales and marketing teams need seamless access to customer data and insights. This information enables them to optimize leads and create effective, targeted campaigns.
- Divergent strategies: When marketing and sales teams have conflicting strategies, the customer experience suffers. Lack of alignment on messaging, targeting criteria, and customer journey mapping can confuse prospects and weaken brand perception.
- Resistance to change: Some team members may be hesitant to adopt new technologies and processes. This resistance to change is a common roadblock, and it is often the reason behind inefficient practices and poor performance.
The role of enablement technology
Enablement technology helps CMOs bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams. It’s used to establish clear processes, promote seamless cross-functional teamwork, and provide regular training and feedback — all of which are essential for driving successful sales and marketing alignment. Integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation platforms, and other tools allow both sales and marketing to share information and insights within a single platform. This leads tobetter lead management, effective campaigns, and personalized messaging that truly resonates with customers.
A recent Seismic study found that 60% of users do not know how to effectively implement enablement tools for their team, and marketing leaders were 28% more likely than average to say this. When implemented effectively, marketing and sales enablement technology helps CMOs accelerate progress toward strategic business objectives like growing their customer base, operating more efficiently, and exceeding revenue targets. In our study, 91% of enablement technology users said it helps them provide a better buyer experience. In addition, enablement technology users were 14% more likely than non-users to say their company achieved its marketing goals in 2023.
Sales and marketing alignment best practices
What can CMOs do to create — and maintain — sales and marketing alignment? Here are best practices that strengthen sales and marketing collaboration, improve efficiency, and drive revenue growth.
- Use a centralized platform to share data and insights. A centralized enablement platform promotes sales and marketing collaboration by giving both teams the ability to access and update customer data, interactions, and insights. This shared visibility ensures that everyone is working with the same information, leading to better decision making, more effective targeting, and improved performance overall. In our recent survey of sales and marketing professionals, 58% of respondents believe that cross-departmental enablement would help their company increase revenue.
- Integrate analytics and reporting tools. The integration of analytics and reporting tools enables new insights into campaign performance, lead conversion rates, and customer engagement metrics. As a result, sales and marketing teams will be better able to track progress, identify trends, and adjust strategies in real time, optimizing results and ROI. AllianceBernstein, one of the largest investment management firms in the world, uses a Salesforce integration with Seismic to maintain contact records, track content interactions as opportunities, and manage client interactions to improve sales and service efficiency. By using Seismic, the company saves 23,000 seller hours each year.
- Create a content hub. Your enablement technology should include a centralized content hub where sales can easily access, customize, and share marketing collateral, presentations, case studies, and product information. Content management capabilities streamline content distribution, empower sales teams, and reinforce consistent messaging across channels. Five9, a cloud contact center solutions company, saves $680,000 yearly through increased seller efficiency by centralizing content in Seismic. Five9’s head of marketing leverages Seismic to surface content for sales, automate the creation of personalized customer assets, and measure content usage and effectiveness. Leverage technology for training and onboarding. Using interactive platforms, video tutorials, and knowledge-sharing tools helps ensure consistent training and onboarding across departments. Aerogen, a global leader in acute care aerosol drug delivery, standardized remote enablement and effective coaching of line managers with Seismic. The results included a 39% increase in deal size and a 54% increase in sellers reaching and exceeding targets.
Driving alignment across the go-to-market organization
Ultimately, marketing and sales alignment requires a concerted effort to foster a culture of open communication, shared goals, and continuous learning. This sets the stage for sales and marketing collaboration, which then leads to improved customer experiences, boosted productivity, and revenue growth.
The Seismic Enablement CloudTM is designed to help CMOs drive greater cross-functional alignment within their organizations by streamlining content production, centralizing materials in one place, and uniting data sources to promote smarter marketing decisions. Our recent study, Generation Enablement Report: The Rise of Enablement’s Influence, explains how marketing leaders across the globe leverage enablement technology in innovative ways to achieve their business goals. Download the report today.
