What Is Sales and Marketing Alignment? [2023]

What Is Sales and Marketing Alignment? 

Sales and marketing are crucial to a company's success. Though their functions are different, they build up into each other to win and grow business. Ideally, marketing attracts customers into the business while the sales close transactions. Traditionally, the two teams have worked in silos (segmented from each other), which results in friction. Sadly, when they aren't aligned, they both suffer.

Nonetheless, businesses can avoid the conflict and its adverse effects on the bottom line by adopting sales and marketing alignment strategies. HubSpot provides some proven strategies for overcoming the standoff between the sales and marketing teams, such as organizing sales around buyer personas, designating staff to receive and qualify leads, and facilitating training between teams if needed. 

Does conflict between sales and marketing teams constantly plague your business? Read on to understand what sales and marketing alignment is, why aligning the two is essential, and how to do it. 

Table of Contents

• Sales and Marketing Alignment in HubSpot
• Why Is It Important to Align Sales and Marketing?
• What Happens When Sales and Marketing Are Not Aligned? 
• How Can You Align Marketing and Sales? 
• Align Your Sales and Marketing with The Insight Studio

Sales and Marketing Alignment in HubSpot

First things first – what is sales and marketing alignment?

Sales and marketing alignment is a strategy involving fostering communication, transparency, and collaboration between the sales and marketing teams, enabling them to operate as a unified function. In return, their collaboration leads to increased efficiency in marketing, boosts sales, and ultimately improves the bottom line.

Getting the sales and marketing teams to work together doesn't have to be complicated. With HubSpot's all-in-one software, collaborating is pretty straightforward. While the platform offers standalone hubs for marketing and sales, you can easily integrate them, enabling your teams to view the entire customer journey from a single dashboard. 

Ideally, the HubSpot solution makes sales and marketing alignment so effortless that all you need to do is sign up and get your teams on board.

Why Is It Important to Align Sales and Marketing?

Aligning sales and marketing has both internal and external benefits. 

Internal benefits include; 

• Better collaboration between sales and marketing teams
• Enables you to create a well-defined strategy
• Encourages buy-in from the business leaders (C-suite)
• Increased efficiency

Ultimately, when the teams collaborate and become more efficient, the ripple effect is felt across the entire company. Some notable external benefits include;

• A clearer understanding of the ideal customer 
• Message consistency
• Customer journey optimization
• Increased conversions and revenue 

According to Demand Gen Report, companies that align their sales and marketing boost their revenue growth by 19% and profitability by 15%. In a nutshell, aligning sales and marketing can help you create accurate buyer personas and a well-defined strategy, generate conversions by connecting faster with qualified leads, increase revenue, and ultimately stay ahead of the competition.

What Happens When Sales and Marketing Are Not Aligned? 

Essentially, when the teams are working in silos, they both suffer. One major downside of siloed teams is creating mixed messages, which can lead to poor customer experiences. According to Harvard Business Review, misaligned marketing and sales goals;

• Demotivate the sales team and withers their commitment to the company.
• Signal unnecessary difficulty, leading to lost sales opportunities. 
• Lead to resource wastage as salespeople splurge on campaigns to achieve their goals.

But once you align your goals, you can expect; 

• Improved collaboration in lead nurturance
• Increased content relevancy 
• Simplified workflows
• Shortened sales cycle
• Better return on investment (ROI)

How Can You Align Marketing and Sales? 

Undoubtedly, misaligned sales and marketing result in wasted resources and efforts. From confusing workflows to overlapping efforts, mixed messaging, and so forth, siloed teams can stagnate your revenue growth immensely. 

However, you can grow your company by aligning sales and marketing using these best practices, as shared by the HubSpot team.

• Hold regular joint meetings – Staying connected is crucial for overcoming siloing. Some ways you can achieve this include ensuring every new salesperson attend an onboarding sales-marketing meeting, having the marketers attend the weekly sales meetings, conducting a monthly meeting with sales managers, attending events together, etc. 
• Create a team email – You should also have an email for sharing information with both teams.
• Collaborate in content creation – With the sales team constantly interacting with the prospects, they can provide helpful information to inspire marketing content. To get their input, you can hold brainstorming sessions during joint meetings or use a shared Google Doc to collect ideas. 
• Involve sales in coordinating content marketing campaigns – This is important as it informs the sales team about the offers the marketing is giving the leads. You can share the information with them by including the promotion on a shared calendar or emailing them.
• Set shared goals together – While both teams have distinct functions, a few metrics, e.g., lead value and conversion rate, matter to both. Setting shared goals together is an excellent way of fostering collaboration.
• Share your reports – Besides setting shared goals together, the teams could go further and share their reports. The information might not be related to their functions directly, but they can gain insights from each other.

Finally, it's equally important to get your teams on HubSpot hubs to maximize the benefits of collaboration. If you're unsure how to start, our team at The Insight Studio can guide you through the process. 

Align Your Sales and Marketing with The Insight Studio

With sales and marketing being central to customer acquisition and conversion, aligning the two is vital to achieving a cohesive process that does not waste resources through isolated team efforts. Adopting alignment strategies such as holding regular joint meetings, collaborating in content creation, setting shared goals, coordinating marketing campaigns, etc., is an excellent step towards aligning the teams to increase efficiency. 

At the same time, you should take advantage of HubSpot's all-in-one platform to empower the teams to collaborate their efforts and create a seamless lead nurturing process. And here at The Insight Studio, we are ready to help you set up and grow with HubSpot. We can conduct a thorough analysis of your sales and marketing processes to optimize and align them for increased consistency. 

Ready to spur your growth? Let us help you get started now.