Sales and marketing alignment Overcoming the sales and marketing gap

Bringing your sales and marketing teams into alignment and unlocking business growth requires policy-led leadership and practical action across strategy, process, content and culture.

Strategy

Measuring is the key to aligning strategy. Agreeing to unify how strategies are measured across sales and marketing will help departments better understand each other.

Process

Customers buy from businesses they trust, and consistent messaging is critical to establishing trust. So your sales and marketing messages need to match for confidence to grow. A customer might make a one-time purchase based on any single factor like price, but repeat business comes from a trusted relationship built over all the customer touch points.

The need for trust is true across B2B and B2C markets. B2B has become an unhelpful misnomer in many ways. We never sell to a business; we always sell to the people within a business. Every sale is to an individual, so every communication they receive from your sales and marketing teams must feel aligned with your consistent messaging and brand values.

LinkedIn research in 2020 revealed that 87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between sales and marketing enables critical business growth (LinkedIn). Still, at the same time, 9 out of 10 sales and marketing professionals say they are misaligned in strategy, process, content and culture despite a perception that they are working together. There’s a gap between perception and reality that business leaders need to bridge.

Sales and marketing teams often use different processes and systems. Using the same systems can increase understanding across the teams and enable them to collaborate more effectively.

Content and messaging

If sales and marketing don’t see each other’s content, this can result in mixed messaging to customers. Reaching across the sales and marketing silos to create and review content together will streamline your output and create a more unified singular experience for the customer.

Culture

Building a shared culture underpins a healthy business, but it needs leadership to grow. A solid internal comms plan breaks down silos and builds relationships. You can encourage your departments to establish cross-departmental teams, attend each other’s meetings, and share successes.