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B2B sales and B2B marketing. Two teams with seemingly different goals. The latter strives to bring awareness to the brand, attract decision-makers, and build relationships with them that keep them moving down the funnel. The former focuses more on securing the deal and retaining the client.
When you think about the purpose of each department, you start to see the overlap. Both involve building client relationships and adopting practices that result in a deal or purchase. So, wouldn’t it be best to align your sales and marketing departments?
When B2B companies align sales and marketing teams it positively impacts customer relationships and business goals. Keep reading for more on the benefits of aligning sales and marketing teams.
The Benefits of Aligning Sales and Marketing
The term “smarketing” is turning up more and more in the business world. It’s the terms marketing and sales blended, describing a single department comprised of both teams. They work closely together to fuel the success of each department and close more deals.
When B2B companies align sales and marketing teams they gain a deeper understanding of customers, they create a seamless customer journey, and leads are more likely to convert. Let’s look at each of these in more detail.
A better understanding of the customer
Sales and marketing departments need to have a deep understanding of the customer. They need to know what decision-makers are attracted to and why they ultimately decide to move forward with closing a deal.
When marketing and sales work together, both departments gain a clearer understanding of the customer. This is because each team has knowledge about the customer that can’t necessarily be learned through data and documents.
For example, let’s say a few people on the sales team encountered the same interesting question from a customer before closing the deal. And the customer says that if they would’ve had this information earlier they would’ve closed the deal a long time ago.
If the sales team shares the question with marketing, the marketing team can create content around the question and publish it in the right places at the right times. Potential clients will come across this information earlier on in their customer journey and it could convince them to close the deal faster.
Or, let’s look at an example from the marketing side. The marketing team collects and analyzes a lot of data, particularly customer engagement data. This data shows the interactions clients have with products, services, and content.
Marketers see that potential clients are engaging with content about one or two specific products more than others when they near the bottom of the marketing funnel. They can share this data with the sales team, and the sales team can then redirect their efforts to securing deals for these products.
Collaborative efforts between sales and marketing teams leads to a deeper understanding of the customer that results in more deals.
A seamless customer journey
Often, sales and marketing will create separate customer journeys to reflect how clients interact with their respective departments. Although this may help develop the approach of each department, what’s smarter is crafting a journey with both departments in it.
A potential client is likely to encounter sales and marketing off-and-on throughout their customer journey.
For example, they could become aware of your company through a blog post. After reading the blog post, they might ask questions to the chatbot on your website run by your sales team. Then, the potential customer might go back to marketing material on your company’s social media. Next comes a call with a sales rep to learn more.
As you can see, it isn’t a straight line from marketing to sales to purchase. Both departments are embedded into the customer journey. The customer journey map should reflect this so that each department is ready to move the customer along in their relationship, no matter where they’re at.
Attract leads more likely to convert
Closing a B2B deal is challenging. Multiple decision-makers are involved in the process. You must convince each of them that investing in your product or service will elevate their company. This could take months, sometimes years. And that is only likely to happen with a quality lead.
Marketing shoulders much of the responsibility for attracting quality leads and passing them off to the sales department. The goal is for their content and messaging to draw in the customers most likely to convert.
The sales department can give insight into who they’ve had the most success closing deals with. Armed with this information, marketing can create content and messages that attract these specific clients. This results in more quality leads for the sales department, aiding a more seamless sales process.
Tips for Marketing when the Department Aligns With Sales
B2B marketing is already a unique process. But it changes when the department aligns with the sales team. Most, if not all, of what marketing does should involve or be run by the sales department to ensure proper alignment.
Here are a couple of tips that illustrate this and fuel a collaborative relationship between the departments that get results.
Set goals together
One of the best things you can do to align your sales and marketing teams is to have them set goals together. What does the sales department want to achieve? What part does marketing play to achieve these goals? What does the marketing department want to achieve? What role does sales play in achieving these goals?
Answering these questions will keep both teams working toward common goals, giving you a better chance of achieving them and seeing results.
Work on content as a team
The kind of content the marketing team creates has everything to do with the department’s success. It’s got to be engaging and unique to catch potential clients’ attention. It also has to move the client along in the customer journey and ultimately get them to the point they close a deal. Aligning with the sales team can be helpful in this regard.
They can inform marketing of the kind of questions they’re getting from customers at different points in the funnel. Marketing can create content that answers these questions. Before they publish this content, they can run it by sales to ensure it’s offering the answers clients are looking for.
Having sales and marketing work together on content creation helps craft a content strategy that gives potential clients the information they need to keep inching toward a deal.
Conclusion
Like every company, B2B businesses can’t excel without strong marketing and sales departments. You need marketing to establish strong customer relationships and brand awareness. And you need sales to close the deals and keep the relationships going long-term.
Each department can accomplish its goals more efficiently and consistently when they work together. Revisit what you learned about the benefits of aligning your marketing and sales teams in this article, and use the tips to begin establishing a collaborative relationship between these departments.
