How to Align Your Brand Marketing and Sales in 5 Simple Steps

Written by michelle on Sep 04, 2020

Running a successful enterprise requires strong teams in both marketing and sales. But too often, these teams operate independently of one another — making it much harder to achieve larger business goals. In order to truly grow your organization, these two teams need to work in tandem. Without aligning your brand marketing and sales strategies, your company could risk low productivity, customer loss, and decreased financial performance overall.

On the other hand, consistent branding across all channels can increase revenue by 23%. So how do you ensure your marketing and sales are aligned for long-term success? Take a look at the following five tips and consider bringing in a fractional chief marketing officer to facilitate these positive adjustments in your structural organization.

1. Meet Regularly to Collaborate and Share: Collaboration is a prerequisite for alignment between your marketing and sales teams. Your staff needs to be able to work together and share information openly in order to reach a common goal. Making sure that regular meetings between marketing and sales personnel take place is one of the best ways to encourage cross-team collaboration. These meetings can be a great way to tackle challenges, set expectations, make good use of available resources, and keep the lines of communication open. Your fractional CMO can play a leadership role in these meetings to foster a unified mentality.
2. Define Goals, Leads, and Buyer Personas: Meeting regularly as a group, with your fractional CMO as a facilitator, can go a long way. But you’ll also need to make sure that your sales and marketing teams reach a shared consensus pertaining to metrics. As any fractional marketing executive knows, sales and marketing personnel need to have the same understanding of what makes a quality lead, what the goals of the company are, and who your ideal buyer is. If teams are permitted to define these terms for themselves, strategies will fall flat and there’ll likely be a huge schism between these two valuable groups. In order to work towards a common goal, everyone will need to agree on what that goal is. Once those specifics are defined, your outsourced marketing manager can lead you down the right path.
3. Establish a Process For Transitioning Between Marketing and Sales: Your two teams will always feel that sense of “us vs. them” if you don’t create a specific process for transitioning between marketing and sales (or sales and marketing). It’s just as important to develop a process that brings leads back to marketing from sales as it is to have an established method that guides a lead into the sales funnel from your marketing campaigns. Making sure each team member knows what to do with a lead can reduce wasted time, promote a learning culture, and strengthen communication. Your fractional CMO can help you to develop these processes and ensure all team members have the information they need.
4. Share Calendars and Plan Events For Relationship Building: Even if your organization has a strong culture, high levels of psychological safety, and high morale, you may still need to put in some work to support cross-team collaboration. Planning events like lunches, conferences, or team celebrations can allow your marketing and sales teams to come together and build trust. Even something as simple as sharing digital calendars can be helpful in scheduling meetings, working on projects, emphasizing shared responsibilities, and welcoming team members into the fold.
5. Establish a Reporting Platform For Improved Visibility: In order to align your sales and marketing strategies, both teams need to be accountable to their results and realize how their work impacts everyone else. Having a centralized resource for reporting and tracking can improve workflow, communication, and personal accountability while ensuring your goals are met. By making this process as transparent as possible, your teams can gain insight into what’s working and what’s not. This will allow you and your fractional CMO to assess where alignment is lacking and make improvements quickly.

As your fractional CMO, I can guide you in your journey to align your sales and marketing strategies. For more information on how my work can position your organization for growth and success, please contact me today.