It is Critical to Align Sales and Marketing

Why do most businesses fail?   

It may not be the reason you think.   

Did you know the reason many businesses fail isn’t that they don’t have the right technologies, processes, or even people? It’s because company leaders are not on the same page as one another when it comes to strategies, initiatives, projects, and anything that affects the bottom line—which is almost everything. As Abraham Lincoln famously said in 1858 about alignment, “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” The same goes for any modern institution, including your company and sales organization. Nothing can damage a company more effectively than when powerful forces oppose each other, whether knowingly or unknowingly.   

However, the good news is companies wise enough to foster the practice of alignment of these three key cross-functional departments (marketing, sales, and services) can find themselves profitable, flush with revenue, healthy, and ready to take advantage of future market opportunities to experience growth once again. If company leadership is sage enough to stay cross-functionally aligned, this circle of corporate excellence can continue indefinitely.   

What is the secret to fostering alignment in your company? If you haven’t heard the term “Sales Enablement” until now, you’ll be grateful you found our blog. Not only is sales enablement the best way to synchronize your efforts and initiatives in the aforementioned areas, but other cross-functional teams in your corporation can also improve when this relatively new vein of organizational communication is implemented.   

It may surprise you that according to Sales Enablement PRO, the adoption of sales enablement has increased by 343% percent in the last five years. If you’re still not convinced sales enablement can be beneficial for your business, just consider that 62% of organizations are now using enablement to organize their sales and marketing efforts. Now, stop and consider that 13% of companies have plans to align strategies that utilize sales enablement within the year. We hope you are starting to understand just how much you can stand to gain from utilizing sales enablement.  

How to build an organization that is aligned for success?  

Show the Bigger Picture. Demonstrating the impact of a new sales enablement initiative is key to a successful rollout. Showing users, the bigger picture of how this new initiative is going to make their work easier will help explain why it is worth the time and effort.  

“It has to show a payoff,” said Ashton Williams, revenue enablement manager Ada. “The same way you would communicate to a customer about ROI, I think you need to do that for your reps.”  

Users will be better prepared to adopt a new initiative when they understand what it is, how it works, and how it will improve their lives.  

Build Internal Trust with Executive Leaders. Building trust with sales leaders is a necessary step to ensure a smooth rollout. The executives on different teams must validate all the content and the initiative’s alignment to their strategic priorities. This can help generate momentum with support from the top down, and increase trust among the leaders that are needed to champion the rollout of an initiative among their teams.  

“They can trust in it…they know that whatever comes from sales enablement has been first validated, and it’s ready to be shared externally,” said Yohan Labesse, sales enablement director at Lectra.  

By building trust, sales enablement teams can also build credibility throughout the organization and form stronger partnerships, which can impact the rollout and adoption of future initiatives.  

Partner With Frontline Sales Managers. Similarly, frontline managers are a valuable partner to leverage due to their direct influence on the sales team in bringing strategies to life. Instead of trying to influence a whole team to adopt a new program, it can be easier to first enlist the support of the sales manager to execute your new strategy locally.  

“By only working with one person, you can engage salespeople in the end, and you know that if the [sales manager] buys into your program, you make sure that the salespeople will use it,” said Labesse.  

Gather Feedback from Key Stakeholders. To ensure the long-term success of an initiative, it is valuable to have feedback on the initiative’s strengths and weaknesses so you can continuously refine, and course-correct as needed. This includes quantitative feedback in the form of data tracked throughout the rollout process. For instance, metrics like the number of users or rate of adoption over a certain period can highlight how successful a rollout is. However, it is important to keep in mind that feedback from data has its limitations. For example,   

• Faulty polling practice: When polling is facilitated incorrectly, either on purpose or by mistake.   

• Flawed correlations: failure to analyze data correctly.  

• Data fishing: performing several statistical tests on the data and only reporting those that come back with favorable significant results  

• Misleading data visualization: By omitting certain data points, trends that don't exist can easily be presented as unbiased, whereas some existing highlights can go unnoticed.  

• Purposeful and selective bias: This occurs when random sampling is deliberately ignored, for a sample that isn’t random, and potentially biased.   

• Using percentage change in combination with small sample size: It’s important to consider how the sample is selected to make sure that it is unbiased and representative of the population  

Things to Consider When It Comes to Sales & Marketing Alignment

Your sales reps should be able to quickly find the content they need for their next prospecting engagement. verbTEAMS, a pioneering platform for digital sales enablement, can help you manage and keep all your marketing content — from one-sheets to interactive videos — organized in one place.   

At the end of the day, sales enablement is simply a means for your marketing department to communicate important information to sales and vice versa. Do the best thing for your company and take the time to properly define what that information is.    

Allow team members to freely communicate ideas in open forums. This is a simple way to gather, evaluate and brainstorm ideas. It’s also one of the best ways to better understand your employees.   

Whatever you do, enable your reps to stop wading through mountains of potentially outdated, non-compliant content in different repositories to find what they need. With verbTEAMS, you can easily control what version of your content is published in real-time, so reps are only sharing the latest version.  

When you’re sharing important information, it’s almost always urgent. Strike while the iron is hot and share your world-changing idea while it’s still fresh in your mind. However, don’t go off sharing half-baked ideas. Take the time to compose your idea thoughtfully, then fire away.    

Henry Ford said the only thing worse than training your employees and having them leave is not training them and having them stay. Training your employees using the most current information and sales tactics is vital to your company’s success.  

Marketing should control the content sales reps have access to. Use a system that allows you to partition, lock, or revoke content access (so they can’t go rogue on you).  

Final Thoughts About Alignment   

As you begin to unify multiple sources of information, opinions, strategies, product information, and even product messaging, your company will begin to build a common understanding among departments, including your marketing and salespeople.   

Don’t forget, the way your employees feel about your product and company is the way your customers will feel about it too. And if your employees don’t know what’s important about your product, neither will your customers. As we mentioned earlier, take the necessary time to define what is important about your company, your brand, and your product. Then, thoroughly and formally evangelize it cross-functionally, before presenting it to your prospect.