5 Essentials of B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment
B2B sales and marketing alignment presents remarkable opportunities for businesses to scale their revenue and realize their business bottom-lines.
Adopting the path of B2B sales and marketing alignment helps marketers convert more of their marketing-generated leads into customers, and accomplish higher ROI, sales productivity, and top-line growth as compared to the brands where the sales and marketing teams operate in silos.
According to combined research by Marketo and ReachForce, companies with aligned marketing and sales teams are 67% more efficient at closing deals. Furthermore, another report from Marketo shows that integrating sales and marketing endeavors leads to 209% more revenue from marketing.In this blog, we have compiled 5 essentials of B2B sales and marketing alignment to help you rethink your ways to revenue alignment – by placing the customers at the epicenter of your sales and marketing endeavors, and to help marketing support sales by delivering hyper-tailored messages at each stage of buyers’ cycles to nurture leads more effectively, and close more deals. Let’s have a look at each of them:
1. Understand that B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Needs to be Measured Against Revenue and Pipeline
Most of the marketers think that their sales and marketing teams are perfectly aligned while this is not the case.In a survey by LinkedIn, 90 percent of sales and marketing leaders termed their organizations to be “well-aligned” or “very well aligned” in terms of sales and marketing collaboration while the data from the survey told an entirely different story that proved the claims to be incorrect.”Marketers need to understand that the actual sign of having accomplished B2B sales and marketing alignment resonates with improvement in business outcomes, which can be tangibly measured against significant improvement in the sales revenue and the pipeline. The mere perception of having B2B sales and marketing alignment doesn’t work and such claims according to the industrial benchmarks are unauthentic and non-reliable.
2. B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment is About Working Towards Shared Goals
In an organization where sales and marketing teams are aligned, there are precise and clear goals for both the teams to collaborate and work on for the greater good of the organization, at large. Surprisingly, many-a-times fun get-togethers and happy hours are confused as sales and marketing alignment. B2B sales and marketing alignment involves an amicable atmosphere for regular in-person relationship development, brainstorming, and collaboration between the sales and marketing teams. This also means that the gaps in the content strategies of sales and marketing teams are bridged by effective joint storytelling, joint planning, and collaboration sessions, and joint budgeting and hiring.3. Alignment of Sales and Marketing Ensures Customer-Centricity
Modern B2B marketing is all about prioritizing the customers’ preferences, understanding, addressing, and resolving their pain-points at each stage of their respective buying cycles. B2B sales and marketing alignment ensures that the two teams work towards optimizing their customers’ experience indexes and have common customer-centric goals and KPIs being defined, tracked, and optimized. The laggers in the marketplace with non-aligned sales and marketing teams, have KPIs that are not at all or only superficially customer-centric.4. B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Has Tangible Impact on Business Bottom-lines and Branding Endeavors
B2B sales and marketing alignment is not the end of the road. Of course, the sales and marketing alignment helps in boosting revenue conversions and boosting the sales pipeline creation process but there’s always more to it. In the long run, B2B teams with sales and marketing alignment can see a positive impact on their brand equity. This automatically boosts the branding endeavors and strengthens the omnichannel reputation management framework of the organization, fetching some additional organic traffic, and bolstering the reach of the brands. Read more on How Omnichannel Reputation Management Assists in B2B Branding B2B marketers can work towards defining, measuring, and optimizing their individual Sales and Marketing Alignment Indexes (SMAX). This will help them in figuring out where they stand along the alignment spectrum and what additional measures do they need to take to strengthen and optimize their pipeline and revenue goals.5. B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment involves working on Shared Technology and Data
B2B companies with sales and marketing alignment share technology and underlying data amongst themselves. This ensures that everyone in both the teams is on the same page and working with the same pieces of information to encourage faster and precise data-driven decision-making to drive business profitability in the best interest of the companies and their customers. Wrapping Things Up For modern marketers, achieving alignment is more crucial than ever to thrive and sustain in the highly competitive marketplace and accomplish tangible revenue goals. Mike Lieberman, Co-founder, and CEO, Square 2 Marketing, sums up the situation as:“One way to build trust between marketing and sales is to make them accountable for the same company goal—revenue.”As the buying behaviors of modern customers are evolving, selling is becoming more complex, and more stakeholders are involved in a single deal than earlier times. In such a scenario, alignment will help both the teams work on an all-encompassing agile content strategy to tell the most relevant stories to their customers, and ultimately collaborate to expedite sales deals, and close more of them to skyrocket the bottom-line revenue goals for the organization. Valasys Media is a well-renowned name in helping B2B clients with productive prospecting and conversion goals by leveraging an array of services including lead generation, lead nurturing, account-based marketing, list building services, contact discovery services, content syndication services, event promotion, appointment setting, business intelligence, and CRM services, and valuable data-driven insights. Contact us to sync up your marketing and advertising endeavors with your revenue optimization goals and to align your sales and marketing strategies for a product sales pipeline development and its efficient management.