A strong relationship between sales and marketing can strengthen your go-to-market (GTM) organization. By cultivating sales and marketing alignment, GTM teams can deliver meaningful and resonant experiences for customers and prospects.
Missing the mark on sales and marketing alignment can prove costly. According to Hubspot, misalignment costs an astonishing $1 trillion a year (yes, trillion with a “t”). However, they also found that organizations with strong sales and marketing alignment close 38% more deals and achieve 27% faster three-year profit growth. I think we can all agree that the latter is more appealing.
In this post, we’ll share how you can get your sales and marketing teams on the same page. But first, let’s look at the current sales landscape and see why stronger sales and marketing relationships are more important than ever.
Not your average buyer
Think about your most recent conversation with a prospect. Even though it was your first time speaking, chances are, your prospect already knew a good deal about your business, its products, and your competitors.
If you’re asking yourself why, the answer is simple: buyers are more informed than ever. On average, buyers have had 27 information-gathering sessions before they interact with a salesperson. And, if that’s not enough, there are increasingly more buyers in a sales cycle – an average of 11 stakeholders with varying influence in a deal.
The fundamental nature of sales cycles is changing. In order to meet the moment, the relationship between sales and marketing teams also needs to evolve. Today, buyers want personalized experiences that are driven by highly informed sellers. In order to deliver these experiences, sellers need the right content and context – and they need it at scale.
Now, let’s pause. This all sounds great, but we can both see where this is going. If sellers need personalized content for every buyer engagement, the burden falls on marketers to produce it. But producing hundreds of one-off documents is untenable.
In order to make this work, marketers and sellers need to work smarter, not harder – together. Sales enablement software empowers GTM teams to streamline and scale repeatable workflows so that marketers don’t have to field one-off content requests, and sellers can easily create personalized, compliant content.
The value of sales and marketing alignment
As noted by Hubspot, misalignment between sales and marketing teams can prove costly. However, successfully aligning sales and marketing can improve business outcomes when both teams come together to achieve common goals. When sales and marketing are aligned, they can create better experiences for customers in the form of consistent, personalized content. In order to drive effective sales and marketing alignment, GTM teams should:
- Develop a shared strategy and determine what goals sales and marketing departments are responsible for.
- Establish open lines of communication to ensure progress toward shared goals and responsibilities.
- Use technology that supports alignment, including a sales enablement solution like Seismic.
Never stop growing.
Bridging the gap with sales enablement
We define sales enablement as the strategic use of people, processes, and technology to improve sales productivity and increase revenue. We mentioned earlier that sales enablement empowers marketers and sellers to become more productive by streamlining and scaling the production of personalized content.
Sales enablement software also has other advantages. One of the biggest pain points in sales and marketing alignment is content usage. A sales enablement platform helps mediate this challenge by providing sellers with a single location to access content. Content analytics embedded in the platform also benefits marketers by giving them visibility into what content is accessed by sellers, what isn’t, and what performs best with customers. As a result, marketers can create more of the content that helps drive revenue.
How to improve sales and marketing alignment
Building sales and marketing alignment isn’t as simple as purchasing a sales enablement solution. It also requires organizations to create a culture of communication and shared responsibilities. Here are three tips your organization can use to get the ball rolling:
- Set shared goals: Collaboration on pipeline generation is a good starting point. Have marketing and sales teams work together to identify the best strategies to attract the right buyers and land meetings.
- Highlight the mutual benefits: Both parties gain when sales and marketing work together. When sales and marketing teams have a strong feedback loop they create better content that helps champion the customer.
- Review wins and losses: Bring together the entire GTM organization to understand what works and what doesn’t. Shared visibility of wins and losses helps sales and marketing teams do more of what works and work to improve what doesn’t.
Drive deeper alignment with Seismic
The Seismic Enablement Cloud™ is purpose-built to help GTM teams drive deeper sales and marketing alignment. If you’re ready to grow, get a demo today, or learn more by clicking any of the links down below!
