Freya Oxton-Grant
When sales and marketing teams are misaligned, it can be detrimental for business growth and lead conversion. However, according to a LinkedIn report, 96% of sales and marketing professionals admit that they struggle with alignment.
Businesses that have siloed sales and marketing teams are missing out, as 85% of sales and marketing leaders say alignment is the largest opportunity to improve performance and grow businesses today.
In your construction business you should strive towards making sure your sales and marketing activities are aligned. This includes working together on one strategy, having aligned goals, being clear on buyer personas, and collaborating throughout the buyer’s journey.
Really, the sales and marketing teams should be working on the same mission, driving sales. You must build an equal accountability for achieving that goal. In an ideal world you would just have one department- the revenue one!
Sales and marketing alignment holds an incredible opportunity for your business to supercharge its growth and performance. Uniting the two together means you can improve your marketing return on investment as well as your sales team’s productivity.
If you can achieve sales and marketing alignment, your business could enjoy a 36% higher customer retention rate, a 38% higher sales win rate, and 39% higher annual revenue growth. Sales and marketing alignment creates efficiencies, a united strategy, and collaboration that generates you stronger performance and growth.
Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices
Drawing Up a Service Level Agreement
Well-aligned businesses have a well strategised and planned out service-level agreement between marketing and sales. This means that both sales and marketing understand the whole game plan. How many leads will marketing generate? Do sales agree to follow up on all these leads and not just pick and choose? Do both teams share an understanding of what a good fit prospect even is?
The service level agreement also plans out timeframes for sales follow up, and how sales will approach prospects whether through email, video, social media, or a phone call.
Lastly, a service level agreement includes a form of accountability, where the system is monitored, and both teams are checked for follow through. This allows you to measure business performance and also spot areas for improvement within your service-level agreement.
Shared Understanding of the Buyer’s Journey
Often in businesses, marketing are the only ones who understand the buyer’s journey, especially if you are operating through the inbound methodology.
Your marketing team gets how today’s specifier has evolved. They understand that they are doing their own research, and only contacting your company when they are so far down the sales funnel they are practically decided on your product.
It’s important that sales understands this too, especially if they are unfamiliar with inbound marketing. They may be offenders of ‘spray and pray’ cold calls and other outbound techniques, but this will erode any efforts your inbound marketing team are making.
Your sales and marketing alignment strategy should set out the stages of awareness, consideration and decision of your buyer’s journey and how each team contributes to each stage. This can bring both sales and marketing on the same page, so they both fully understand the prospect they are targeting, and the sort of marketing activities and sales outreach that will work for that prospect.
Make It Easy for Sales
Sales reps want everything to be tactical and efficient. Developing an easy to understand and easy to reach-for sales playbook can lay out exactly what the shared plan is for each stage of the process.
Bringing a bit of organisation behind it will allow sales reps to work efficiently and effectively, knowing what actions they need to take, which tools to use, and what content/ marketing collateral works when.
Whether connecting or closing, sales will be equipped with everything they need with clarity and a clear inbound approach. This means that marketing and sales will both be on the same page and that your entire strategy is implemented throughout.
Conclusion: Sales and Marketing Alignment
When 90% of sales and marketing professionals agree that when their initiatives are aligned, the customer experience is positively impacted, you know you are onto a winner. Sales and marketing alignment can maximise revenue opportunities and creates a single focus for your building product business.
Want to learn more about sales and marketing alignment for your building products or construction business? Read our Complete Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment here.
About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.
They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.