At my estimation there are probably 4 billion articles circulating on the topic of sales and marketing alignment and why it’s important. I tend to be of the opinion that 99% of them are surface level, jargony pieces that don’t actually speak to the practicalities of what it means to have an aligned workforce and also why it’s absolutely business critical to focus on it in the first place. 

I’d like to start with the benefits of aligning your commercial teams. And yes, marketing is a commercial team. If it’s not, it needs to be as of yesterday with revenue goals and quotas. Putting this into place, while in itself quite a big change for some orgs, will immediately bring sales and marketing much closer together due to their combined focus on what actually matters for businesses - delivering bottom line revenue. Shared goal, shared vision = results. Up to 32% increase in YoY revenue, according to Aberdeen Research.

Now that your marketing team and sales teams are focused on the same goal, what other benefits will your company see? Number one has to be cost saving and eliminating wasted marketing budget. Pushing out campaigns across various channels with limited view of what the output is, should be vastly reduced when your marketing teams are commercially focused. Of course, output is not always immediate and in B2B, rarely is. It’s important to take a long view of the returns with marketing, the same as it is with sales. (For in-the-weeds detail on how InVizible does B2B marketing, check out this piece here). So with focus, comes less wastage. This frees up capital to invest into revenue generating measures, hiring, training/upskilling etc. 

Next on the list is sales output. Marketing’s core function should be to provide the business with regular, high potential and qualified leads. This allows sales teams to operate at a much faster pace, closing deals that have been pre-qualified. Research suggests that this approach leads to 38% higher win rates for sales teams (Source: MarketingProfs). Additionally, customer retention increases dramatically - 36%.

Finally, what we’ve seen is that company culture improves with metrics such as employee engagement. Sales and marketing teams both can see their work bear out in a materially impactful way, not just within their core roles but across the wider business and functions. It gives a sense of strategic ownership and importance which cannot be underestimated when it comes to motivating and empowering coworkers.

As it stands, only 44% of companies have formally defined what a sales and marketing alignment should look like. In our experience this has been heavily weighted towards technology companies and companies that are younger. However, this need applies to every single B2B organisation operating today. The worrying trend is that companies who do not adopt these progressive strategies are falling behind their competitors. InVizible has seen first-hand examples of clients who, when adopting S&M alignment, are able to unlock new markets, bring new products or services to their customers faster and increase overall market share. 

Nearly all business leaders that we speak with agree that bringing this alignment about is important. 90%+ say that it is on their 3-5 year roadmap. When we dig a little deeper into why it’s not happening now, it nearly always boils down to a combination of lack of resources, focus on other projects or no one responsible for the delivery of alignment. What we’re hearing is that really it’s not a priority right now. Hopefully by reading the above, you share the sentiment as to why this is critical and why it needs to happen now.

The road to bringing these, often very siloed and independent teams, together is often littered with obstacles and internal and external pressures. InVizible are the business partners that guide you, your leadership teams and your various functional teams through each stage of the process. We take the time to understand your business with all its intricacies, map out the path to success while being 100% accountable to the bottom line revenue. 

To learn more about how we empower businesses to discover their hidden revenue, please get in touch.