Bridging the Gap: How Integrating Marketing and Sales Strategies Amplifies Business Success

Fostering Collaboration Between Departments for Enhanced Reach and Engagement

The dynamics between marketing and sales have historically been closely-tied and wildly different. At a basic level, marketing teams manage promotional tactics while sales teams fundamentally warm leads and close deals. Together, they go hand-in-hand to drive business for their company and impact the bottom line.

Despite some distinct differences between the two departments, marketing and sales should be strongly aligned with goals, projects, and analytics. Yet, when a business looks at its marketing and sales teams, it often finds this to be far from the truth. Developing a strategy that creates strong interdependence to optimize success is the key to bringing these two together.

Different Departments, Same Goal

Our previous blog outlined the clear differences between marketing and sales teams. While these differences exist in many companies, it’s important to empower both sides to work together cohesively to generate success in both departments.

According to HubSpot, 87% of the terms that sales and marketing teams use to describe each other are negative. This can only be counterproductive for creating a strong alignment. Marketing has been known to refer to sales as simple-minded, incompetent, and lazy. Meanwhile, sales use terms like “arts and crafts” and “irrelevant” to describe marketing.

However, this could not be further from the truth. Without marketing support, sales teams would not be able to get the warm leads they need to close a sale quickly. Without a solid sales team, marketing would not have on-the-ground insights from specific markets to create relevant content.

Marketing and Sales Feedback Loop

Developing an interconnected strategy that creates a feedback loop is the key to marketing and sales alignment. Marketing teams do heavy market research on a company’s target personas to understand their ideal customers’ demographics, lifestyles, and behaviors.

All information created and used to sell to the customer should reflect their specific interests, pain points, and concerns. Without this detailed research, both teams struggle to target the right lead accurately. While sales can use this information to address their customer better, their team receives feedback from regional markets that may differ slightly from the more generalized personas that marketing created. This regional-specific information is vital for marketers to understand their audience better.

This is just one way a feedback loop is essential to seeing positive communication and successful campaigns for sales and marketing. The feedback loop is where both teams communicate continuously, providing back-and-forth communication and adapting their approaches based on this feedback. To ensure communication, the teams must regularly meet through onboarding, weekly sales, and management meetings to review goals and analytics.

Incorporating marketing and sales alignment into the company’s culture and processes is a great practice to ensure this feedback loop stays strong. Therefore, leadership and managers must reiterate that neither sales nor marketing is the king of the mountain. Rather, they are both pivotal generals in the company. Ensuring an equilibrium between salaries of lateral sales and marketing roles will help the mentality.

Finding Harmony Through HubSpot

It is important to embrace the tools that facilitate marketing and sales alignment. Meetings are a great way to stay on track, but they aren’t enough to ensure your teams are in sync.

Marketing automation tools like HubSpot are built to blend marketing and sales teams into one well-oiled machine. HubSpot coins Smarketing, which refers to marketing and sales alignment created through frequent and direct communication.

Companies that practice Smarketing ensure that two departments have one goal and established measurements to achieve that goal. They also make goals together and review them frequently.

For instance, according to DemandGen, 74 percent of organizations that use marketing automation and CRM said their sales and marketing teams are aligned.

As the lines blur between marketing and sales, empowering both teams to be experts in their field is crucial. HubSpot separates its software into a Marketing Dashboard (complete with analytics, blog performance, and content creation tools), and a Sales Dashboard (highlighting deal forecasts, sales performance, and prospect tracking). HubSpot brings the two together while amplifying each with its productivity tools.

HubSpot’s tracking allows marketing and sales to determine when a lead visited a website, how long they were there, and what they searched for. Not to mention its ability to create complex workflows for email nurturing to ensure no lead goes unnoticed. This gives both teams more information to do their job better and convert the lead into a customer.

Marketing and Sales Alignment

As a digital multifamily marketing agency, we practice what we preach. We combine sales and marketing efforts to drive traffic, warm leads, and send a potential customer down the buyer’s journey. Through marketing and sales alignment, we can drive results and ensure success for our clients and our agency.