How to Implement Sales and Marketing Alignment for Increased Conversions

While sales and marketing teams often operate independently, this siloed approach is no longer viable in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Achieving sales and marketing alignment is essential for optimizing the operations of both departments, closing more deals, and improving your brand in the eyes of prospects.

In this article, I’ll show you four different ways to implement sales and marketing alignment for increased sales conversions.

I. Before your sales pitch: Do your homework

Before pitching to a prospect, you should learn as much as possible about them. This includes their business goals, their current challenges, their background — anything that’ll help you understand their needs better.

Here’s how sales and marketing alignment supports this process.

1) Harness marketing insights for more efficient sales meetings

If you track the time your sales reps spend speaking to prospects, you’ll find that these meetings are extremely time-consuming.

However, if your reps are prepared to address a prospect’s needs right off the bat, the time spent in each meeting, as well as the number of meetings required to close a deal both, decrease significantly.

Reps can then use the time gained to pursue more leads.

Remember, your prospects won’t necessarily tell you everything about what they want or need. Sometimes they aren’t even aware of how your product can bring them value — unless you proactively explain how its benefits correspond to their specific business goals.

With sales and marketing alignment, the sharing of data makes this process far easier.

Here’s an example. Your marketing team can use tools like Google Analytics to track each prospect’s journey on your site. They can identify the kind of content, such as articles, product pages, or case studies a prospect viewed before they contacted you.

This information will give your sales team a better idea of what interests them and help them understand a customer’s needs more easily.

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2) Study the user journey to gauge pitch readiness

Even the most talented sales reps won’t be able to close a lead who isn’t ready for a pitch.

If you want to maximize conversions, you’ll have to reach out to prospects at the right time. With sales and marketing alignment, you can easily identify when a prospect is ready to be transferred to your sales team.

Website analytics and monitoring social media engagement are essential for getting this right.

Your marketing team can monitor a prospect’s journey on your site to understand how well-groomed they are. By seeing which content the prospect is interacting with and when you can determine whether they’re ready for a pitch.

For example, if a lead only signed up for a newsletter, they might still be a long way from being pitch-ready. However, if they’ve viewed a product video in its entirety, shared your video on LinkedIn, and tagged their friend in your ad on Facebook, then they’re definitely interested and could be primed for a sales pitch.

When your marketing team can deliver this packaged information to your sales teams, salespeople can be more discerning in which leads they spend time pitching, and also understand their interests a bit better.

II. After your sales meeting: Be strategic in your follow-up

Sales and marketing alignment can also boost conversions through processes that occur after pitch meetings. Your sales reps can relay important insights from their meetings over to your marketing team who can then optimize their campaigns accordingly.

Here’s how.

3) Use feedback from sales meetings to shape your marketing strategy

Your sales reps will receive tons of information about your leads from their meetings — what their pain points are, what their goals are, and what they are willing to invest money in.

This information can be used to understand your target audience better and optimize your marketing strategy.

For example, if your company provides a task management service and most prospects emphasize ask about automation during calls with your sales reps, your marketing team can make a greater effort to promote the tool’s automation capabilities in their content and campaigns.

This doesn’t always have to be a manual process. If your sales team conducts webinars for their product demos, then you can use engagement analytics to understand more about customers’ needs and priorities.

For example, ClickMeeting, a webinar platform, offers a few different CRM integrations that support pushing metrics regarding audience engagement, such as questions asked and attention minutes, to your entries for each lead.

Having access to these logs in your CRM helps marketing create better messaging strategies, especially when it’s possible to correlate your highest-value customers with the webinar engagement and content engagement touchpoints that originally converted them.

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4) Customize marketing follow-ups based on calls with prospects

Most leads don’t close after just one sales meeting. Usually, it requires multiple follow-ups and lead nurturing from both your sales and marketing teams.

Getting these follow-ups right is critical.

The marketing lead nurturing emails a lead receives after a sales call greatly differs from the kind of marketing messages they received before a call.

To help your marketing team ace this, your sales team should convey any important information they received during their meetings. Your marketing team can use these insights to structure their nurturing emails to be more relevant to a lead’s needs and increase their chances of becoming a customer.

For example, if your product is a CRM tool and your prospect was very interested in your integrations in the sales call, your marketing team can send a follow-up email with articles or e-books that further explain the integration capabilities.

Your leads will now be receiving the right content at the right time to get them to convert!

Close more deals and make work easier with better sales and marketing alignment

Sales and marketing alignment requires a high level of synchronization, information sharing, and flexibility. But embracing it is essential to improving your business. Especially for growing companies, making sure these two key departments are on the same page is the key to reducing redundancies and optimizing operations.

As these departments work more closely together, they can help each other reach their goals and bring in more revenue for your business.