Sales and Marketing Management: Aligning Your Teams for Success

When it comes to sales and marketing management, alignment is critical to success.

That’s right: critical.

Why? Because your sales and marketing teams have different skills, mindsets, tasks, and even goals. Believe it or not, those differing factors are not only complementary to the other team, but can cause success, or failure, for both.

Now, before we get too deep, let’s first define the differences of each team.

Your Sales Team

The goal of your sales team is to sell. It’s simple.

Salespeople, sales reps, sales advisors, business developers—whatever you choose to call your sales staff—are expected to prospect for new clients, develop relationships, and close deals.

The purpose of your sales team is to keep your business in business (and hopefully grow it along the way).

Your Marketing Team

The goal of your marketing team is to create brand awareness, educate buyers, and support sales.

Marketing reps, coordinators, and directors play various roles when it comes to marketing, but they all have a common purpose: to assist in the selling process.

Many times, this assistance is indirect. An example of indirect assistance is inbound marketing. This is when the marketing team creates content in the form of blogs, eBooks, white papers, video, and social media content in order to attract viewers (potential leads) to your company’s website.

Other times, this assistance is more direct. An example of this is when marketing teams are responsible for lead generation for the sales team. After the marketing team attracts viewers to the site, they then track the information and activity of these viewers for the sales team to use when selling.

Then there are marketing functions that are responsible for selling your product or service. These types of people market directly to consumers through advertising. Perhaps they create ads online or have harnessed the power of social media.

When it comes to your marketing team, your reps might perform one or all of the functions above. Regardless, your team likely has a common mission: to understand buyers. Collecting and analyzing data is key function of your marketing team.

Sales and Marketing Management: Aligning Your Teams

Now that we’ve defined the primary functions of each team, let’s talk about where sales and marketing management and alignment comes into play.

We believe that there are three areas that are critical for alignment that many companies forgo. So don’t be one of them!

When it comes to sales and marketing management, there are three critical areas to consider.

The three areas to are:

1. Buyer personas, or, understanding your buyers.
2. Client relationships, or understanding how to develop relationships with your buyers.
3. Sharing processes and best practices using your Sales PlayBook or PlayBook app

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing more about each of these three critical areas. Don’t want to wait? I put together an eBook on sales and marketing alignment that breaks down sales and marketing alignment and details the three critical areas mentioned above. Click here or on the image below to grab a copy!

It’s time to make sales and marketing management a breeze—and get your teams aligned for success!

Cover photo by: Joey Kyber