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What is my marketing and sales strategy plan missing?

3 mins read

Alignment? Risk taking? Going back to basic? There’s a lot of advice out there on how you should create the best marketing and sales plan, which can certainly present some challenges.

So, it’s no wonder things can slip through the cracks and you end up missing them from your wider strategy plan. To help, I've pulled together the top things that you might be absent from your marketing and sales strategy right now.

Alignment of marketing and sales

For your marketing plans to go off without a hitch, goals need to be aligned and resources pulled together from all over the business - especially, these two departments.

This may seem like an obvious step, but it’s one that can easily be overlooked when you’re making your marketing and sales strategy plan.

Failure to align sales and marketing teams is leading to wasted budget and resources. Up to 70% of B2B content is underutilised when these teams aren’t on the same page.


Affectionately named Smarketing, ensuring both teams are aligned in their goals and communicating well is essential to making your strategy a success. This all starts with creating a single customer journey.

The marketing team is the sales team’s biggest asset to generate right fit leads. Likewise, marketing needs feedback from sales to fully understand the pain points and challenges sales experiences. With this understanding, marketing can help provide content that addresses these issues, helping convert customers.

It’s easy to become siloed in either role, but when working in tandem it’s far easier to track results and make effective smarketing decisions.

New ideas and risk taking

Resist the urge to only use the same channels and marketing strategies you’re familiar with. While it’s fine and dandy to keep using tactics that have historically worked for you and gets results, always be on the lookout for emerging trends, backed up by data. 

Two emerging marketing trends are video and voice search optimisation. 

Video has been steadily increasing in popularity for years. Each year, data has shown an increase in video’s ability to engage and convert customers. Here's why they work:

  • They put a friendly face to your business, meaning prospects already have a level of trust with you before they reach out
  • They improve engagement by being visual and attracting more interactions on the feed
  • Videos are more memorable and shareable, they make challenging topics and concepts easier to interpret. Plus, they significantly improve brand recall
  • They can elevate already interesting written content, becoming a dynamic duo with longform blogs to push them out in the SERP
  • They make prospects more likely to buy whatever you're putting out there by being top converters. Most people are visual learners, it's no surprise that videos are great at pushing prospects through the buyer's journey 

In other words, you can no longer leave video out of your marketing and sales strategy. 

With the boom of home assistant devices, optimising your website for voice search is a great way to get ahead of your competitors. 

Despite the research showing this strategy’s potential since assistant devices were first released, many businesses overlook voice search optimisation when investing time and money into SEO strategies.

Don’t be one of these businesses - get ahead of the curve before you fall behind. 

Current resources analysis

Nothing can scupper a sales strategy plan like overestimating (and even underestimating) what your marketing and sales teams are capable of. Your teams are there because they are experts at what they do. 

A CRM (customer relationship manager) platform will give you access to a holistic view of the customer and their journey. To marketing and sales this is invaluable. A good CRM can bridge the understanding gap between the two teams and provide a deeper insight into what roles each department plays in this customer journey. 

Leaving them to twiddle their thumbs without juicy projects or plans to sink their teeth into means all that talent is underutilised. In the same breath, you also don’t want to overwork your most valuable assets.

Get input from your marketing and sales teams members about your proposed plan to see if they think it's possible with the current resources available. From here, determine if your plan needs rethinking and if your teams need extra support to carry out your aspirations. 

Your marketing can be lifesavers for sales by creating collateral they can use during the sales process. Email templates, videos, educational guides, blog content - they can put their creativeness to use and do what they do best, all while helping out the sales team.

An honest assessment of your current capabilities and resources are vital in creating a realistic plan based around SMART targets.

The tried and tested tactics

You don’t have to scrap all of your previous marketing and sales strategies in favour of shiny new trends.

It’s important your strategy plan is up to date with current trends, yes. But if a certain form of marketing - such as email campaigns - has always generated quality leads for your business, don’t stop doing it without proof that it's no longer working for you. 

Some examples of tried and tested marketing strategies that are still completely viable include: 

After a year like the last, it’s understandable that businesses like yours might need some guidance and reassurance on your sales plans going forward. There's nothing wrong with that. 

There’s so much help available to businesses wanting to improve their lead generation through sales and marketing strategies. Digital 22 is one of those resources here to help.

A helping hand with your marketing and sales plans

Get the best out of 2021 and make this the year you aim higher, achieve more and generate better leads. Learn more about what your business can do to smash your lead generation goals and book your 30-minute consultation with me. 

As the Head of Solutions at Digital 22, I’ll be happy to guide you through what your company needs to do to achieve your lead and conversion goals. Whether it's help setting out your MQL and SQL criteria, targets to set or any other burning questions you might have, I'm on-hand to advise and help your business move forward.

Click the link below to book a free, no-catch consultation with me.