6 best practices for aligning sales and marketing

Before you can fly straight into everything sales and marketing collaboration has to offer, the start can be pretty daunting. What do you say? What do you do? Keep reading to find the answer to learn how to start aligning sales and marketing:

1. Have regular meetings

The first step in aligning sales and marketing teams is to forge a simple connection. And what’s the best way to do that? Have regular meetings and network with each other! Shocker, right?

Regular meetings are effective to amalgamate the resources, vision, and goals of both teams so they can begin working together cohesively. They allow both teams to stay updated with what the other is doing and provide a platform to contribute to those efforts in their own way. 

It also impacts the level of trust, comfort, and expectations within the workplace. But how do you reach this seemingly far-fetched concept of a connected workplace with regular meetings? 

Here are a few ideas to get you started on this:

• Have an onboarding meeting for each new salesperson which both teams attend. This allows the new salesperson to understand the level of resource and process sharing between both teams and gives room to field any questions the new member has!
• Attend weekly sales meetings to understand how the sales team is doing and what support they can use at the current time. Marketers can even utilize these meetings to ask for content ideas to craft the next offer or write a new blog post.
• Have a monthly managerial meeting. Having the leaders aligned is key to sales and marketing collaboration and these meetings can be useful to analyze results, tweak any processes, and stay on track. Throw in a few KPIs to analyze, and managerial meetings will know just what to fix (or not)!

2. Set shared goals (and track them)

The universal truth about marketing and sales is that they have different objectives, functions, and KPIs. In short, they have different goals. For instance, a sales team will often hone in on meeting their annual revenue goals while the marketing team might be fixated on improving the website’s search ranking!

And of course, different goals mean different priorities which leads to an uncooperative and competitive work environment. 

However, a good rule of thumb in smarketing is to give both teams a set of shared goals. By identifying common KPIs that both teams can influence and measure, you give them a reason to collaborate, cooperate, and ultimately achieve together!

3. Celebrate and show off your sales team

Marketing teams are built to promote every aspect of your business. From your products and PR campaigns to behind-the-scenes within the company, their role is to utilize all their resources to distinguish you from the others. 

The one thing marketing doesn’t do is contact prospective customers. That’s what sales teams are for! And so, marketing teams can leverage their expertise to establish salespeople as trustworthy, relatable, and experienced folks!

Here are some ways you can elevate your salespeople and their success:

• Get them to post the company’s content on their personal/professional social media platforms. This would broaden your audience reach, create a sense of belonging within the team, and showcase the salesperson’s expertise.  
• Ghostwrite a blog post with them as a co-author or author. This can be done where you interview them on a topic, get their opinions, and write it down into a blog post with a little bit of your marketing magic!

4. Meet outside the workplace

One of the best things you can do to integrate two teams into one is to take them out of the workplace itself! Knowing each other as people and not colleagues over fun outings will build trust, forge friendships, and develop a level of comfort that’ll seep into the workplace in no time!

You can go for activities as simple as grabbing lunch together to well-planned team-building activities such as:

• Laser tag,
• Karaoke night,
• Office trivia, 
• Cook-off, or even
• Camping! 

The only thing to keep in mind about these meetings is this: Focus on having fun!

5. Coordinate content marketing with sales

Similar to how salespeople should supercharge marketers with the knowledge they have, marketers should also bolster salespeople in other ways. Perhaps one of the top tips for aligning sales and marketing, it’s important to keep the sales team updated on content marketing efforts.

Whether it’s a new promotion, offer, or discount, inform your salespeople so they’re aware of what their leads have received from the company already. 

Sounds a little too complex? Don’t worry, executing this strategy is simple:

• Create a shared Google calendar and include the promotions on the right dates and with the correct URL, a summary of the promotion, and a simple description. 
• If you’re using email marketing, forward the emails to each salesperson on your team. You can also send out a group email with a few important notes about new offers, stats, business use cases, and even an updated quote of the week!
• Share follow-up email templates for new offers for your sales team to strike up a conversation. These types of emails should be concise, attractive, and specific about how you can solve the prospect’s problems.

6. Refine your content creation 

Adding a flair of sales in content creation is a concoction to success. Your sales reps are folks who are regularly in touch with prospective clients and know practically every gem of information marketers are looking for. Pain points, what excites them, what they respond best to… you name it! 

Now, the plot twist is that they’re too busy to be noting all of this down. Their job is to close deals and then some more. So how do you get all the critical information down to your marketers?

Here’s how: 

• Host a brainstorming session at every weekly sales meeting to ask each salesperson if they have any content ideas that would be received well by prospects. A document of this brainstorm can be proofread by the sales manager and sent over to the marketing manager!
• Share a Google Spreadsheet with salespeople where they can add references, inspiration, or ideas about content creation that’ll attract more prospects. They can come back to it any time and add more and more concepts, fueling your marketing team’s efforts.

Final Thoughts

Aligning sales and marketing is no easy feat. These two sister teams might have slightly different disparate goals, but they work for the same end result: company success. So when you need them to work together, you’ll want to kick things off with the right approach. 

And in this blog, we’ve covered 7 ways to knock it out of the park when it comes to marketing and sales alignment. If you are still figuring out the reigns of sales marketing alignment, Jaldi can bolster your efforts. 

With our simple and effective CRM system meant to save time and get more done, sales and marketing can benefit from real-time data, analytics, and progress! Book a demo today and find out what makes us the top choice for many businesses like yours.