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Puppy and park.
Beach day and ice cream.
just a few things clearly Let’s get our act together — but what if we put sales and marketing together on that list? Do you still think they worked as a pair?
Perhaps you don’t consider your sales and marketing to be the “peanut butter and jelly” of your company. But collaboration between sales and marketing is more important than you think.
Taina Palombo-Price, Global Product Marketing Leader at LinkedIn, said: You can’t have one without the other. ”
Here, explore Palombo-Price’s tips for strengthening your organization’s sales and marketing alignment in 2024.
But first, why is sales and marketing collaboration important in the first place?
Simply put, sales and marketing alignment is important because while they may seem like two separate organizations focused on different goals, both teams are working in one market for the business. This is because it falls under development activities.
“Even if you’re under two leaders, you’re still one team because you’re all working toward the same goal. Or so you should be,” Taina Palombo-Price told me. .
Buyers today expect a consistent and seamless buyer experience, but this isn’t possible if sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned.
Additionally, strong collaboration between sales and marketing is critical to a business’s bottom line. In fact, sales professionals who say they collaborate with a marketing team are 106% more likely to say they’re exceeding sales goals this year.
But increasing sales and marketing alignment, or creating stronger, more consistent processes in 2024, can be difficult to achieve. So here are some tips from Palombo-Price.
How to create stronger sales and marketing alignment from LinkedIn’s global product marketing leader
1. Create goals that your sales and marketing teams can share.
Marketing teams often target top-of-funnel metrics like traffic, leads, and brand awareness. However, their job usually ends when they create an entirely new contact or salesperson.
The goal of sales, on the other hand, is to close deals and increase revenue.
Palombo-Price said this separation of goals is often the biggest barrier to successful collaboration between teams.
“Having KPIs separated rather than unified means people are working towards achieving goals to get paid. “Alignment works best when these goals are tied together and teams are looking at revenue metrics across both sales and marketing together,” she says.
Palombo-Price added, “And then you start thinking about it as really a connected funnel rather than a series of different tasks that drive one set of KPIs.”
To foster stronger alignment, it’s important as business leaders to take the time to align both organizations around one common metric, such as revenue. Each organization can set different KPIs based on that one metric, but grading each KPI to one unified goal ensures that both teams speak the same language when it comes to alignment and performance. You can start talking.
2. Ask your marketing and sales teams to create buyer personas with you.
Marketers have solid information about consumers. We conduct extensive research, engage with prospects through social media and email, and hold focus groups.
But marketers have probably never spoken directly to these prospects. They may not fully understand your prospect’s biggest pain points or the current challenges your product or service is facing. Can not solve. These insights are only available to your sales team.
Ultimately, to get a complete picture of your consumers, it’s important that each team collaborates on creating buyer personas. For example, let’s say you have your marketing team create an initial buyer persona through research and brainstorming sessions, but then you need to gather input from your sales reps to revise and refine that persona.
To ensure each team is working together with the same consumer in mind, it’s important to get initial input from sales reps and seek final approval on buyer personas.
3. See which ones marketers know kinds The number of leads a salesperson needs in a given quarter.
To be honest, as a marketer, I never thought that sales reps might be looking for different types of leads in a given quarter based on their current pipeline.
But it makes sense.
Palombo-Price explains: “Sales teams don’t always need the same kind of targeted precision in the conversations they want to have. If the pipeline is full, they’re having a lot of high-level conversations and are on track to close big deals this year. The need to close is limited. They only want to talk to buyers who are deeply interested in the market, meaning they are ready to buy something. Therefore, that threshold is It’s very different from the moment you’re trying to expand and grow.”
She continues: “It’s about getting the right kind of leads at the right time, at the right speed.”
This leads to the next point and solution to this challenge: regular check-ins between sales and marketing.
4. Set up regular check-ins between the BDR/SDR and marketing team.
One of the most important roles when it comes to sales and marketing alignment is the BDR (Business Development Representative) or SDR (Sales Development Representative).
BDR/SDR focuses solely on prospecting and qualifying leads and pushing them further down the sales funnel. Therefore, BDR/SDR is an important part of sales and marketing alignment.
Palombo-Price said she encourages biweekly or monthly check-ins between BDRs/SDRs and marketing people responsible for lead generation.
She said: “It’s important to walk into a room and look at, ‘What is marketing driving?'” How do you move through each stage of the funnel? What impact does that have on the ideal person I want to be?”
She ensures that both sales and marketing teams sit together and constantly monitor how their lead scoring strategy is working in terms of sales lead generation and how to continue to improve it. We encourage you to do so.
5. Use these check-ins as an opportunity to educate both parties.
Once you’ve scheduled biweekly or monthly check-ins between sales and marketing, you need to make sure that both parties are open-minded and eager to learn from the other. If each team plans on blaming the other when a lead isn’t qualified or a deal doesn’t go through, meetings quickly turn sour.
As Palombo-Price says, “Instead of just coming to the table and saying, ‘All of these prospects are garbage,’ we should come to the table and say, ‘We had 15 conversations this week, and six of them were completely off base. “I did it.” Then watch it together. ”
She continues: “If you don’t educate in both ways, you won’t be able to better target your marketing. And sales assumes that the ideal customer profile (ICP) they’ve been chasing is always correct. But we know that the buying demographic is changing.”
Ultimately, a joint evaluation is required where both teams are willing to examine the successful and unsuccessful aspects of the process.
6. Leave functionality at the door.
When we asked Palombo Price for her top tip for business leaders when it comes to aligning sales and marketing, her advice was simple. Her idea was to leave the functionality at the door.
She says, “It’s a funnel. It’s not really two teams, it’s one team within the business that’s trying to sell the product or service. I think it actually makes it very difficult to understand how it impacts a rep’s win rate.”
She continued, “The intent is to try to help bring some of that out through the lines so that the impact of the work is visible on both sides. That’s our solution. We’re going to put the spreadsheet together. There are ways to look at it and make that adjustment early on so that the concept starts to take hold before you think about how you’re going to leverage the functionality.”
7. Track all customer interactions with your company.
Now, this is one of the most important strategies you need to implement. This eliminates customer friction and also helps sales reps close more deals.
For example, when you first talk to a sales rep, they ask you where you work, how long you’ve been there, which email newsletters you subscribe to, and which companies you have connections with. Think about how you would feel if you already knew. Events you attended. You’ll probably be even more impressed than talking to a salesperson who’s never heard of you before.
It’s important to find a way to track all of your customers’ interactions with your company. His CRM is very helpful for this. You may also want to check out HubSpot’s CRM integration with LinkedIn. This allows LinkedIn Sales Navigator to match LinkedIn lead and account data with HubSpot contact and company objects. (This integration is currently in beta, but you can sign up to receive updates on the launch date.)
Ultimately, understanding the entire buyer process from start to finish, understanding which aspects marketing should be responsible for and which aspects sales should be responsible for, and creating a clear and transparent relationship between sales and marketing. Building a culture that fosters effective communication will be critical to your organization’s success in 2024. onwards.