How to Align Your Sales and Marketing

Despite having different roles, the two teams are crucial to the customer journey, from the awareness stage to post-conversion. Unfortunately, working independently creates silos, sometimes leading to duplication of effort or even customers slipping through their fingers for lack of coordinated efforts in nurturing them. According to statistics, United States companies waste over $1 trillion yearly for a lack of coordination in their sales and marketing departments.

To mitigate this, in comes sales and marketing alignment, a RevOps (revenue operations) strategy that enhances collaboration between the two teams to create a streamlined process. Effectively, working in sync boosts sales, with research showing that companies can increase their revenue by 208% from marketing efforts as a result of aligning sales and marketing.

What Is RevOps?

Revenue operations (RevOps) involve integrating sales, marketing, and customer service efforts to create a streamlined customer experience and grow revenue. Implementing Revops using a solution such as HubSpot allows the teams across departments to view the customer journey from a single dashboard. This results in better communication and increased transparency, eliminating duplication of efforts. 

In addition, operating as a unified team increases efficiency, ultimately boosting revenue. For instance, when aligned, marketing can help the sales team achieve their goal by nurturing leads and engaging the customers more effectively, while the sales can provide the marketing team with insights such as customer feedback, content relevance, etc. HubSpot explains this by outlining components they believe are crucial when creating integrated workflows. These include organizing sales around buyer personas, designating staff to receive and qualify leads, and facilitating training as needed.

Ideally, successful RevOps creates a workflow to facilitate a seamless buyer journey while allowing each department to carry out its respective day-to-day activities. That is, the departments still retain their functions, but their efforts are more transparent and coordinated, enhancing better management of the now unified process.

Importance of RevOps

As mentioned, aligning your sales, marketing, and service teams has numerous benefits. Let's look at them in more detail;

1. Revenue Growth
   Implementing RevOps allows teams to work more efficiently. This translates to improved customer acquisition strategies and better lead nurturing and customer relationships.
   
   For instance, once the marketing attracts and nurtures a lead, how fast the sales step in to guide the lead through the next stage on the funnel can determine their ability to convert them. An integrated process empowers the sales to act quickly, ensuring the prospect does not slip away into the hands of a competitor.
   
   Consequently, eliminating segregated operations ensures the smooth progression of a prospect through the buyer journey for a superior customer experience, ultimately influencing the conversion rate.
   
   
2. Predictable Business Growth
   RevOps powers the alignment of sales, marketing, and service efforts, allowing them to enrich each other's efforts for increased efficiency. As a result, integrating workflows provides valuable insights you can use to predict business growth.
   
   
3. Accurate Buyer Personas
   Ideally, the marketing team is responsible for creating buyer personas, a task they accomplish with the help of data from analytics and client interviews. On the other hand, the sales team understands customers' pain points and goals better as they interact with them directly. Getting the team to work together enriches the process by availing more information to create accurate buyer personas. 
   
   
4. Stay Ahead of Competition
   Marketing teams are constantly studying the market to understand the trends. Collaborating with the sales team provides them with vital competitor intel that can help them pitch the products/services more competitively.
   
   
5. Resource Sharing
   Another huge impact of RevOps on businesses is that it promotes resource sharing. The teams share information amongst themselves, eliminating the need for departments to invest individually to gather the information. 

How to Align Your Sales and Marketing

By aligning your sales and marketing, you break down barriers that create wasteful segregated operations. There are many ways you can achieve this, including;

1. Focus on the Customer
   With the ultimate goal of sales and marketing being revenue generation, RevOps initiatives should emphasize the importance of focusing on the customer. Among other benefits, this should help eliminate rivalry by getting everyone to prioritize the customer's needs.
   
   
2. Merge the Sales and Marketing Funnel into a Revenue Cycle
   Each step on the sales and marketing funnels is crucial in the buyer journey. As you integrate your marketing and customer-facing departments, it's vital to merge the two into a revenue cycle. Outline each step on the funnel, define roles and assign them to the respective teams. This way, you can smoothly move the prospect through the various stages of the funnels without a slowdown or duplicated efforts. 
   
   Ideally, marketing will still retain top-of-the-funnel roles while the bottom end of the funnel remains with the sales. But you also need to clearly define where the marketing picks over once the customer has converted to continue engaging them.   
   
   
3. Create Insight Sharing Channel
   As the sales and service team interacts with the customers, they gather valuable feedback that you can use to enhance the customer experience, improve the product, or inform future marketing campaigns for better reach. In the same way, marketing gathers useful insights through analytics and research, which can be beneficial to sales operations. Encourage the teams to share their insights by creating a channel for collaboration.
   
   
4. Strategize Together
   In addition to an integrated digital platform, the teams should regularly hold joint meetings to strategize as one unified unit. This is an excellent way to nurture the spirit of collaboration and facilitate cross-team buy-in.
   
   Besides brainstorming on new ideas and shared feedback, you could also use the meetings to discuss processes and review performance. 
   
   
5. Create Joint KPIs
   Having created the revenue cycle, it's necessary to integrate metrics. As much as each team should retain its metrics for departmental performance evaluation purposes, having integrated metrics is crucial to the success of RevOps. For instance, the teams can spot opportunities where more focus is needed for the overall success of the collaboration.
   
   
6. Unify Your Message
   If your sales and marketing teams use different terminologies to refer to the same processes, products/services, etc., ironing out the differences is vital. Adopting similar terms allows consistent communication with the customers.
   
   

Tap into the Benefits of RevOps by Aligning Your Sales and Marketing

Indeed, RevOps is the solution to the wasteful asynchronous operations of sales and marketing teams. If your teams are working in silos, there's no doubt you've been losing in terms of productivity and efficiency and, consequently, revenue loss.

Fortunately, you can remedy this by aligning your sales and marketing as the starting point to implementing RevOps in your business. But if the process sounds technical, especially setting up on HubSpot, you can always partner with a HubSpot Consultancy like The Insight Studio for assistance. If you need help with aligning your sales and marketing, kindly schedule a time to chat.