One of the most critical steps for any company is to align their marketing and sales teams. Creating alignment and ensuring marketing and sales teams are working toward the same goals will make you more effective, limit disagreements, and help to ensure your sales pipelines are full.
Working remotely can pose a challenge for all departments to follow through on goals. This is especially true for your sales and marketing departments. But by following a few simple tips, you are able to guarantee your sales and marketing teams remain in alignment, even when working remotely.
Why Is Alignment Important?
According to the Aberdeen Group, successfully aligning sales and marketing can help you:
- Generate 32% higher revenue
- Retain 36% more customers
- Achieve 38% higher win rates
A strong alignment between sales and marketing teams helps your company generate more leads, shorten sales cycles, retain more customers, and make better forecasts.
When working together your business can:
- Close more sales and increase your customer base
- More easily track results and make high-impact changes
- Claim a higher mindshare
- Close bigger deals
- Increase business revenue and experience faster growth
- Develop strong strategies for marketing and sales
- Use a CRM to qualify leads and maintain a useful database of contacts, prospects, and opportunities
- Gathering meaningful metrics for accurate forecasting
Remote Alignment Tips
Set Clear Goals
When businesses set goals, they are often based around driving sales and increasing revenue.
While these are great goals, they often are not measurable and department-based. By setting strong goals, you ensure that your departments have a sense of direction and the ability to create action steps.
Examples of Marketing Goals
- Publishing/posting new content on a pre-set schedule
- Target numbers for interaction with content, such as form submission, files downloaded, and emails opened
- Target number of marketing qualified leads (MQL) in a certain time period
- Obtain a targeted amount of market-driven revenue
Examples of Sales Goals
- Increased or diversified market share
- Obtain targeted revenue within a time period and monthly recurring revenue goals
- Increase sales qualified leads (SQL) per time period
- Set goals for win rates, contract values, time to close, and customer acquisitions
Hold Regular Meetings Between Departments
To align your sales and marketing teams, holding regular meetings is crucial. Meetings ensure strategies are aligned and both teams understand their roles. Together sales and marketing teams can create buyer’s personas, create strategies to qualify more leads, and give critical market trend updates.
Setting up meetings does not have to be difficult when remote. By leveraging technology such as Zoom video conferencing or Slack messaging, your team can stay in touch whenever it is convenient for them. Additionally, by using HubSpot’s Meeting Tool, your team can schedule meetings that align with everyone’s schedule at the click of a button and integrate with preexisting video conferencing platforms.
Work on Creating Content Together
Traditionally sales teams would make cold calls and build customer relationships, and marketing teams would create valuable behind the scenes with content and tools. However, by maximizing technology, both teams are able to work together to create quality content and help strengthen each other’s strategies.
Sales teams are skilled at ensuring strong relationships are built, while marketing teams are skilled at effective communication. By working together, both teams' unique skill sets can be integrated into each other’s jobs. For example, sales teams can offer insight to help hook prospects, while marketers are able to offer insight on effective communication tactics.
Examples of Collaborated Content
- Case studies or previous customer success stories
- Thought leadership pieces and informational blogs
- Infographics with relevant industry statistics
When your teams work together, leads are able to recognize your company as a trusted resource. By gaining a prospect’s trust, your sales teams are able to move them along the sales pipeline effectively.
Utilize Weekly Reports
Communication between sales and marketing teams is important, especially when working remotely. By releasing weekly reports or sharing a weekly slide deck of projects, teams are able to view and track activity. While this tool does not replace meetings altogether, using weekly reports can help track goals, allow for collaboration, and ensure project deadlines are met.
Additionally, weekly reporting allows marketing teams to discover what material would be useful for sales teams. By creating valuable content tailored around your company’s unique buying process, you are able to effectively close deals. Weekly reports can offer your sales team visibility into the marketing department’s work. Additionally, your sales teams can be aware of marketing assets available to them, such as case studies, relevant blog content, videos, new pages on your website, and nurture campaigns.
Leverage CRMs
Working with a cloud-based CRM, such as HubSpot, ensures your team stays connected from anywhere in the world. CRM platforms track pipeline data, closed opportunities, deal cycles, and contact details.
Benefits of a CRM
- Improve and track data
- Enable you to take action based on real-time data
- Manage sales team activity and assign clients, tasks, and playbooks
- Create strategies to increase sales and track potential revenue
- Offer your teams the ability to make informed decisions
- Enable your teams to manage revenue and deal pipelines
- Allow you to increase customer retention rates
- Offer you the data and tools to hit quotas
Additionally, HubSpot allows your sales teams to send emails directly from the platform and utilize templates. By partnering with your marketing department, your sales team is able to have prewritten effective communication pieces and nurture campaigns. Leveraging these tools saves your team time and ensures prospects are moved through the pipeline effectively.
Working remotely can present many challenges in communication if a company does not properly leverage technology. By maximizing tools, companies are able to ensure seamless communication and productivity between their departments. ManoByte is experienced at implementing technology to help your teams align their goals. Contact one of our Business Growth Consultants to discover how we can help you reach your objectives.
