For some organizations, attempting to align your sales and marketing teams feels like playing the lottery: you keep trying because the payoff would be huge, but deep down, you don’t expect it to happen. Sure, sales and marketing might collaborate on a few initiatives, but at the end of the day, they operate as two departments with their own processes, objectives, and performance metrics.
It’s always been this way, so it’s destined to stay this way, right? Not quite!
The walls between sales and marketing departments are coming down throughout every industry. Teams are unifying, and businesses are starting to experience the meaningful results that come when brilliant folks on both sides come together.
The driving force behind this sales and marketing alignment? Effective sales enablement. It’s an approach that empowers sales, yes, but marketing plays a critical role in shaping and supporting that strategy to power meaningful wins.
At its core, sales enablement centralizes strategy, planning, execution and insights that your sales team can act upon. Here’s what that might look like and guidance to help you finally get it right—but first, a nod to why these efforts are worthwhile.
Sales and Marketing Alignment = Revenue Growth Driver
When sales and marketing functions operate on the same page, every part of the customer lifecycle improves. Conversion rates increase, marketing qualified leads are nurtured more effectively, sales calls become more productive, client retention improves and revenue grows.
If you’re not already prioritizing sales and marketing alignment, you’re leaving money on the table—and likely quite a bit of it. Statistics show that sales and marketing misalignment can cost companies an average of 10% of revenue each year.
It could be a case where potential buyers receive disjointed messaging from marketing and sales, which cascades into confusion and a loss of trust. Or sales teams may not be adequately equipped with the right content or resources to move a potential buyer’s purchase decision along. In either case, what you’re left with is a situation where prospects take longer to convert—or don’t convert at all.
Done correctly, sales enablement supports higher win rates, improved efficiency and better ROI from marketing campaigns. Sales and marketing professionals can each showcase their own value within the bigger picture while driving critical business growth.
Foundational Elements of Sales and Marketing Alignment
Mutual respect
When sales and marketing teams are unified, there’s no mudslinging or blaming the other team when the organization falls short of its revenue goals or campaigns aren’t yielding the results anyone necessarily hoped for. Instead, both departments have a firm grasp of the other’s roles and responsibilities and a healthy respect for their colleagues’ expertise.
Internal service level agreements
Highly-effective sales and marketing partnerships are often rooted in SLAs. These agreements outline each department’s responsibilities. For example, the marketing team may be responsible for delivering a set amount of qualified leads by a certain date each month or quarter. Additionally, the sales team may be responsible for reporting the outcome of each lead so marketing can optimize its methods or alter its criteria.
Shared data
Aligned sales and marketing teams leverage closed-loop reporting. Because everyone has access to the same data, both teams can use shared insights to support better outcomes. This promotes more effective sales enablement by allowing marketing to identify where sales needs more support in closing deals—whether that’s in the form of proposal templates, product one-sheeters, explainer videos or other marketing resources.
Buyer-centric content
In an organization with high-functioning sales and marketing teams, every piece of content is developed with a clear purpose based on a mutually developed and agreed-upon customer journey. All sales reps understand how and when to use sales enablement content as they guide buyers along the path toward a decision. In the same vein, sales content is cataloged and easy to find (preferably in one digital spot) to further support its use.
What High-Functioning and Aligned Sales & Marketing Looks Like
Given the gaps between most marketing and sales departments, it’s easy to assume marketing and sales alignment is impossible. But there are organizations that have cracked the code.
Sales enablement success stories
For example, Kuno worked with an international company that lacked a solid process to work, audit and clean contact and company records within their HubSpot database. They also had Salesforce operating in a separate silo. When this company wanted to integrate a new sales tool into their business development efforts, they knew they first needed to do some foundational work and enlisted Kuno to lead the process.
We worked together to understand the full buyer’s journey, starting with how traffic came to their site all the way through closing and converting a prospect into a client. This helped us map appropriate Lifecycle Stages within HubSpot and identify how and when a contact would progress to each stage—as well as back and forth between the two systems, to either push prospects to Opportunities or continue nurturing them.
This change resulted in the necessary foundation for integrating ZoomInfo RevOS to HubSpot, which brought contacts into their tech stack with over 50 data points, providing the sales team with an arsenal of information to build sales pitches and objection-busting responses. It also allowed marketing to create more segmented emails and conversion points that did not need to ask for further demographic information, shortening forms and improving user experience.
In another instance, a manufacturer’s sales team felt the 30-40 marketing qualified leads driven through inbound efforts were not quality leads, essentially ignoring them. To prove these leads’ value, Kuno set a goal of enrolling 160 MQLs into sequences, hoping five of those, or three percent, would convert to sales qualified leads, with one turning into an Opportunity.
We utilized the HubSpot Sales automation platform to assign tasks for each MQL, including LinkedIn invitations, calls, emails and InMail, and kept a close eye on identified micro and macro KPIs. In only three months, these sequences resulted in four opportunities, one of which closed successfully with a deal worth over $750,000.
What Are Organizations Getting Wrong With Sales Enablement?
Unfortunately, many companies make plenty of sales enablement mistakes, undermining sales and marketing alignment. Usually, we’ve found that poor processes and ineffective technology are to blame.
Leaders tend to develop sales processes early in a company’s lifecycle and fail to adjust those processes as an organization scales and evolves. Or worse, they fail to document any processes at all.
Sales enablement cannot be tackled without first clearly defining your sales process. Determine whether every existing process still supports your objectives and identify your biggest hurdles and pain points. Then, ensure the marketing team is clear on both the process and obstacles so they can help develop relevant strategies to overcome them.
For example, suppose a SaaS company evaluates its pitch stage and discovers prospects often object to an offer by saying they don’t understand how the product can achieve their specific business goals. In that case, the marketing team may help by creating mid-funnel content, like case studies that demonstrate how the product achieves success for existing similar clients.
Of course, even if your company has an airtight sales process, technology can still undermine alignment. For example, if your CRM and marketing software aren’t properly integrated, it’s virtually impossible for marketing and sales leaders to understand each others’ challenges or effectively track customer journeys.
Fortunately, this is fixable, too.
3 Ways to Finally Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment
While you may not be able to align your sales and marketing teams overnight, it’s not as complicated as you might expect. Here are three things you can do now to work toward more powerful sales enablement and an iron-clad sales-marketing alliance:
Assess Lead Scoring and Goal-Setting
A marketing team’s performance is often evaluated by how many leads they generate, while a sales team’s performance is assessed by how many leads they close. This can result in marketing teams delivering loads of unqualified leads and sales teams rejecting leads without adequate explanation.
One way to solve this challenge is by reassessing your lead scoring process and ensuring both sales and marketing leaders agree on how values are assigned. Then, hold both teams accountable by setting clear standards and goals. For example, you might set a goal that 60% of new revenue must be generated from marketing efforts and that sales must follow up with all SQLs within a set amount of time and report on outcomes.
Teams with a vested interest in each others’ success are more likely to work together. This fosters the sort of organic problem-solving conversations that lead to powerful sales enablement solutions and more effective tools in everyone’s toolbox.
Invest in the Right Technology
The tech solutions you choose have tremendous impact on how well your sales and marketing teams can align as well as your ability to deliver sales enablement content at scale. When each department uses separate platforms to manage their workflows, automate tasks and track performance, it creates data and communication silos. Without a shared space or effective integration, it’s challenging if not impossible to effectively launch sales enablement content. The right CRM is critical in these situations, and everyone relevant to the customer lifecycle needs to know how to read it and use it.
To break down these silos, make sure your sales and marketing tools integrate and allow for closed-loop reporting. If not, consider upgrading to a platform that does.
Celebrate Wins and Evaluate Losses Together
When you achieve your goals, don’t celebrate separately. Bring marketing and sales teams together to acknowledge victories and recognize each department’s contributions. Similarly, when you fall short on marketing-influenced revenue or sales targets, dissect the issues as a unit and identify sales enablement opportunities for improvement moving forward. Facing wins and losses together helps end the ‘us vs. them’ mentality prevalent in many organizations.
Sales and marketing alignment isn’t a myth or a brass ring—it’s a critical initiative that can significantly boost revenue and bolster job satisfaction for everyone involved. By tackling alignment and prioritizing effective sales enablement, you’ll be better positioned to thrive now in our era of uncertainty and regardless of whatever the future may hold.
The Future of Sales and Marketing Alignment: What’s Next?
Speaking of the future, there’s no shortage of advancements helping to further bridge the gap between sales and marketing departments.
As is often the case these days, AI is leading the charge—with HubSpot Breeze AI being a prime example. HubSpot’s AI platform, debuted at INBOUND in 2024, helps businesses identify companies with high buying intent so marketers can focus on targeted lead generation and sales can dedicate outreach to the most promising leads. While marketing teams can use the platform’s insights to create more targeted content that aligns with buyer segment needs, sales teams can personalize their pitches and outreach to align with buyers’ behaviors.
At the same time, there’s a cultural shift in motion. In an age when prospects and clients alike have come to expect—and demand—more seamless, personalized experiences, the traditional handoff from marketing to sales is no longer enough. Businesses are adopting a more continuous, buyer-centric engagement model, where sales and marketing strategies work in sync to streamline transitions and foster growth.
Let Our Experience in Sales Enablement Guide Your Business
At Kuno Creative, we know that sales enablement is about preparing your team for a sales process prospects expect and prefer. This means you should create informational content to provide insight, value and preemptive answers to questions and objections, use marketing automation tools to make sure potential clients are followed up with at the right time and on the right channel and provide the sales team with training and guidance on how to maximize these resources to close more deals faster.
This is no easy task, and that’s where Kuno can help. We’ll equip your team with the tools, content and tech they need to engage buyers, streamline the sales cycle and turn more qualified leads into clients. Let’s chat about how we can align your sales and marketing functions to support better business outcomes.
Editor’s Note: This post features updated data and information and is based an original post published November 2022.
