Have you noticed that work teams, including sales and marketing, who both speak to potential and current customers, often work in silos? It does not make sense or cents. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, sales-marketing misalignment is estimated to cost businesses more than $1 trillion each year.
Having worked in Sales and Marketing leadership roles throughout my career, I have learned firsthand that when the two partner together, everyone wins. The customer experience improves, and the organization achieves better business results. Employee satisfaction and job fulfillment rise, too, resulting in less quiet quitting.
So how best to get sales and marketing on the same page? The following are proven tactics regardless of company size or industry:
5 Ways To Increase Marketing and Sales Alignment
1. Communicate A Lot and Often. Establish reoccurring cross-team meetings to share what everyone is working on each week. By talking about key priorities, people will have a chance to see the overlap and ways to support each other. Furthermore, as the new year approaches, proactively discussing strategies and aligning roadmaps early on results in more productive working sessions.
2. Walk In Each Other’s Shoes. The best way to increase employee empathy and support is by experiencing responsibilities and challenges beyond one’s role. If you are in Marketing, join the sales team at meetings and listen to the questions prospects ask. The information is gold for optimizing website content and marketing collateral. Sales leaders also can benefit by joining marketing meetings to align on segmentation, paid search keywords and content testing, PR stories, and more that help in storytelling with prospects and clients.
3. Establish Common Metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators). When people share goals, they naturally work better together. They innately care to communicate more and consistently collaborate for the greater good. However, this can’t happen without #4.
4. Hire and Retain The Right Leaders. Knowing that culture starts at the top, it’s essential to recruit Sales and Marketing people with a collaborative mindset who share a customer experience (CX) passion. Managers must ask the right questions during interviews to avoid costly mistakes that occur when there are organizational silos. More details about the right questions in my upcoming newsletter.)
5. Do the basics right. There’s no scientific equation to create bonds between people. Relationships happen when there is an intentional desire to be helpful and supportive without egos in the way. I highly recommend you pick up the phone, especially during times of conflict, and have a discussion versus sending a text or email that often gets misinterpreted. While we live in a high-tech world, nothing is more effective than a personalized and authentic conversation.
Ultimately, breaking Sales and Marketing silos is not just a nice thing to do but a brand differentiator that your competitors fear. If you have not been showing up as a unified aligned team internally and externally, start now. It is not too late.
