According to Ranstad, 80% of businesses recognize the multiple benefits of aligning sales and marketing. This is really encouraging for a future that more companies will break down the silos among teams. However, it has also been observed in the same report that 60% of the companies aren’t still bringing the teams together.
This means that many companies acknowledge the power of aligned teams but they’re still not ready to do this in action.
What are the actual benefits then of bringing together marketing and sales?
Shared vision
When teams come together, they are able to understand better each other’s goals. The marketing team can learn more about the sales targets, while the sales team can understand how the marketing funnel works and why it’s important to create a strategy across all stages.
By spending more time together, the teams are able to acknowledge how each division works towards their vision. Most importantly, they are able to perceive how a shared vision can bring a new more holistic idea of the company. This helps them have a clear picture of how their work goes beyond their team and how it can benefit multiple departments.
Facing the challenges together
Every team has different challenges that have to do with the available resources, the budget, the time restrictions, or any other important priorities. This doesn’t mean that they can’t communicate the challenges with other teams to ensure that they can contribute to their solution.
For example, if the sales team faces the challenge of meeting their revenue target, the marketing team can jump over and suggest an increased marketing activity that can lead to more incoming leads and prospects.
Similarly, if the marketing team has trouble in understanding how their work moves along the funnel, they can ask for the sales team to update them on the prospects that turn into customers. This will help in exploring more details about the marketing attribution points and how they help them meet their targets.
Improving communication and learning from each other
A great benefit of having the marketing and sales team work together is the increase of transparency.
An improved communication of the targets, the challenges, and the expectations leads to a more organized company. This can enhance the team building, the team collaboration and also the achievement of the key targets.
Moreover, team members can learn from other departments different perspectives on how everyone works towards the wider business goals. This can also lead to a further interest in other areas of the company and even new skills that can improve a team’s productivity.
For example, the sales team can learn more about inbound marketing to help them explore how this reflects the sales targets.
Meeting the targets and improving efficiency
Another benefit of having the marketing and sales team come together is the ability to act as a bigger close-knit team that works towards the bigger goals.
By breaking the silos a company manages to make them feel part of a bigger team that wants to meet the key targets. For example, a marketing team that meets the key goals should still be aware of the wider business goals. If the revenue is not going as expected despite a successful marketing strategy, then the outcome would still require an improved efficiency.
And that’s how the different teams can benefit from working together to achieve the wider goals while helping each other.
This can improve a company’s productivity while boosting the team morale that everyone works hard towards a common goal.
What’s next
There is an increased interest in marketing and sales team to start working closely together, in an attempt to meet the modern business world’s demands.
The next challenge is to convince more companies to bring the teams together to explore the multiple benefits of it.
It’s time to discover the best ways to bridge the gap between marketing and sales and how this can work towards an improved customer experience.
If you want to learn more about this, don’t miss our next webinar with Tim Flagg, ClickZ Podcast Host at ClickZ Intelligence and Mark Bornstein, VP Content Marketing at ON24 on March 29.
