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The closer your sales and marketing teams work, the better it is for your entire company. To highlight just how important alignment can be (and something you should work on right away), here are the drawbacks of a misaligned team can have.
Which Content is Working?
Marketing teams spend a lot of time creating and publishing free content that brings in visitors and also content which sales teams can use to help make purchase decisions. It can be anything from blogs to eBooks, but misalignment between both teams makes it pretty much impossible for your marketing team to know what is and isn’t working.
As there’s a lack of communication from both sides, your marketers won’t know which type of content is resonating with prospects through sales teams and which ones aren’t working at all. That’s quite dangerous, as misalignment can result in the same content which hasn’t been working being produced over and over again.
On the other hand, alignment between sales and marketing creates a culture of communication. When that happens, sales teams can more confidently approach your marketing team and tell them what has been working and what type of content they should be producing more.
Wasted Time for Sales and Marketing
Your marketing team could be churning out plenty of content, but that can backfire on your sales team if the content being produced isn’t exactly what they need. Misalignment means both your sales and marketing teams are less likely going to talk to each other, update each other on their goals, ways or working or even agree on working towards the same metrics.
As a result, sales teams can be forced to make their own content they know will work rather than spending valuable time chasing good-fit leads.
It can also lead to time being wasted for your marketers. It would be more helpful if both sides knew which type of content to produce. By being on the same page, sales and marketing can focus more on what does work.
Lack of Visibility and Understanding
Because of poor communication and no visibility into how each team works, the marketing team will have no way of knowing if outdated or off-brand content is being shared and circulated by the sales team, while the sales team might have no choice but to use outdated content in the first place.
Your inbound strategy can suffer massively, as newer marketing materials might not even be circulated by the sales team if they think the content within isn’t something leads are going to benefit from.
This means the full campaign could be a waste of time if the sales team has no intention of sharing new content and instead, using outdated materials instead.
It’s not a smart approach. Outdated content or even materials that are off-brand or of no relevance to good-fit leads can quickly turn them away from you entirely. Plus, it also means your marketing team is unable to analyse any insightful data based on the inbound campaigns because the content they specifically created hadn’t been used.
An aligned team, on the other hand, could see your sales team get involved in the inbound campaign planning sessions where they can provide their experience to help shape the entire campaign. Their input means your marketing team can create exactly the type of content your sales team knows will work, without the risk of sharing outdated materials or any that are off-brand.
What This All Results In
A lot can suffer from misaligned sales and marketing teams, including...
Poor Leads
With poor communication and misaligned teams, your marketing and sales teams will waste energy, time and effort on unqualified leads. They’ll both blame each other for either not using the right content, approaching leads too quickly or even claiming the marketing content isn’t good enough.
With no clear focus, they can’t target good-fit leads and will waste time on bad ones.
This can snowball even further. Poor leads mean a lack of growth, sales win rates and retention rates can decrease massively while a lack of alignment can make closing deals much more challenging.
Inaccurate Personas
Your sales and marketing teams are responsible for attracting, nurturing, delighting and closing deals in inbound marketing. So, they can’t succeed if they’re not on the same page as a lack of communication and understanding can result in them finding that the buyer personas don’t match up to the target audience.
It means your marketing team can’t help generate content that will capture the audience your sales team is chasing. They won’t understand customers properly and buyer personas will be inaccurate - neither will take ownership of that.
Decreased Revenue
The reason HubSpot’s report found that misaligned teams cost $1 trillion a year is because 79 percent of leads never convert into sales. Thanks to a lack of nurturing and the fact that 73 percent of them are never contacted.
If your company continues to have poor sales and marketing alignment, fewer deals will be closed and can achieve 208 percent less revenue than organisations with connected marketing and sales teams.
So, you can’t stay ahead of the competition and it means your inbound strategy will suffer. On the other hand, aligning your sales and marketing teams improves collaboration between both sides.
This helps them understand your customers better, they grow personal relationships, they can target better and more qualified leads, business productivity can increase and so much more.
Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams to Achieve Inbound Success at Enterprise-Level
It’s more challenging for enterprise companies to have their marketing and sales teams aligned overnight, especially since you’ll have many more employees compared to smaller businesses. Sales and marketing alignment is just one of the aspects you need to focus on when it comes to achieving inbound success at an enterprise level.
We’ve created a comprehensive eBook: Inbound for Enterprise. You’ll find plenty in there about what the marketing landscape currently looks like for enterprise companies like yours, how to implement and succeed in your inbound campaigns and even useful tips on the strategies you should look into.
To get your free copy, click the link below.
