How to Grow Revenue Faster with Sales and Marketing Alignment

When your sales and marketing teams operate in silos, your business wastes resources, misses opportunities, and creates fragmented customer experiences. This disconnect compromises the customer journey and affects your bottom line.

Aligning marketing and sales isn't just a helpful suggestion. It's essential for driving revenue and business growth. I'll show you how to bridge the gap between these teams and share expert tips from marketers and sales professionals.

Key takeaways:

• Sales and marketing alignment improves lead quality, reduces unnecessary costs, and drives faster revenue growth.
• Clear agreements about responsibilities, goals, and strategies helps everyone work toward the same objectives.
• Open communication between sales and marketing teams prevents siloed planning and keeps everyone accountable.

What is sales and marketing alignment?

Sales and marketing alignment is the process of coordinating the two teams in terms of goals, strategy, and messaging. It involves upfront agreements, regular check-ins, and consistent communication.

When these teams are successfully aligned, marketing generates qualified leads that sales can convert. This creates a cohesive customer experience that drives revenue while eliminating wasted efforts.

How marketing works with sales

Marketing supports sales by delivering qualified leads via targeted campaigns and content that speaks to prospects at every stage of the buyer's journey. Marketers typically take responsibility for gathering market intelligence, creating sales enablement materials, and collaborating with sales on lead qualification criteria.

How sales works with marketing

Sales supports marketing by sharing data-driven feedback on lead quality and content effectiveness. Salespeople are generally responsible for providing details about customer objections and questions and communicating the reasons when business is won or lost.

Why sales marketing alignment matters

Getting the two teams to work together is critical for businesses of every size. Here are some of the most important benefits of sales and marketing alignment.

Shared customer data

When sales and marketing teams share customer data, they can make more informed decisions. This prevents strategies from going in different directions, allows for more accurate forecasting, and can even unlock revenue generation opportunities.

Improved lead quality

Strong sales and marketing alignment means everyone agrees on the definition of a qualified lead, often using a standardized lead scoring system. This means marketing can deliver prospects that match sales' criteria, and sales can close leads more effectively.

Coordinated content

When both teams work to create a cohesive customer experience, everyone can use the same content to achieve goals. Marketing can develop content that addresses prospect needs at each buyer journey stage. And sales can use these resources at the ideal moment.

Reduced marketing and sales costs

The greater the alignment, the more the two teams eliminate redundant initiatives and wasted efforts. This prevents ineffective marketing campaigns and sales time spent on unqualified leads. As a result, it lowers costs and directs budget toward efforts that really matter.

Faster revenue growth

The quicker sales and marketing teams work together, the faster they can shorten the sales cycle. With consistent messaging at each stage of the sales funnel, prospects can make decisions sooner. This means deals close in less time, driving revenue faster.

7 Strategies for alignment between sales and marketing teams

Achieving sales and marketing alignment doesn't have to be difficult. Use these best practices to get everyone on the same page.

1. Define shared terms

To align sales and marketing, one of the first challenges to overcome is agreeing on what specific terms mean. Some of the most common terms include:

• Marketing qualified lead (MQL): What criteria does marketing use to identify potential customers?
• Sales qualified lead (SQL): What criteria does sales use to vet marketing leads for follow-up?
• Lead scoring: How do both teams assign values to leads based on fit, intent, or engagement?
• Sales pipeline: What are the stages and how do leads move from one to another?

2. Agree on goals and KPIs

As Marie Hillion, Head of Marketing at Livestorm, explains in the webinar Closing the Gap:

"You have the marketing teams that focus on creating great campaigns and want to generate MQLs but don't necessarily track the conversion rates of those leads. And on the other side, you have the sales team that sometimes complains about the quality and volume of the leads. The two ways of doing things can cause a lot of frustration and friction."

To work together, teams need to agree on shared goals. But this isn't necessarily easy.

As Madkudu revops advisor Peter Kirk explains, marketing and sales teams are naturally measured on different goals. "Ideally the goals should roll up to revenue, but they don't always. So you can end up with teams that are trying to do different things. If leadership is misaligned, then incentives stay that way."

To resolve this difference, Peter recommends that sales and marketing come to an agreement on the proxy. One way to do this is to create a plan around the initiatives the teams think will drive revenue. Once they evaluate lead quality and follow-up, they can review and revise.

Peter shares that a big part of working on shared goals is creating a service-level agreement (SLA). Marketing may say, "we need sales to follow up with these leads within X period of time and put X number of touches on them," while sales may say, "we need marketing to send us leads that will convert at X rate."

3. Use shared software and data

Adopt a unified tech stack that allows sales and marketing data to flow seamlessly. This way, all teams have access to the same customer information, interaction history, and lead scoring data.

With a connected customer relationship management (CRM) tool and marketing automation software, you eliminate data silos and create transparency, which helps everyone make smarter decisions.

4. Get clear on your ideal customer profile

Work together to define your ideal customer profile (ICP) based on market research and customer data. Include psychographics, firmographics, and technographics so both teams clearly understand the definition.

As Livestorm CEO Gilles Bertaux explains, it's important to incorporate both sales and marketing data into your ICP definition. And it's just as critical to review and refine your ICP periodically.

5. Understand your customer journey

Analyze how prospects go from awareness to consideration to conversion — and even to advocacy. Map out the buyer journey for each ICP so you understand their questions, considerations, and decision-making frameworks.

When you know how prospects navigate their purchasing journey, you can create content that speaks to them at each stage. In many cases, you can accelerate lead generation and guide them to the next stage more efficiently.

6. Create shared marketing and sales assets

To create a cohesive customer experience marketers and sales reps have to align on messaging. One of the most effective ways to do this is to develop a shared library of marketing and sales content assets.

As Marie explains, Livestorm has an extensive sales enablement library. It includes bottom-of-funnel content like one-pagers and case studies that sales can use or customize for specific ICPs.

7. Communicate openly and hold frequent check-ins

Aligning your sales and marketing departments requires much more than a one-time meeting. Instead, it involves regular check-ins and ongoing communication.

This can include weekly, monthly, or quarterly meetings. Gilles shares that Livestorm uses a three-step process for quarterly meetings. First, team members review quarterly goals asynchronously. They meet for a debrief before the end of the quarter, and then they review and agree on goals for the upcoming quarter.

However, meetings are just one option. Sales and marketing teams should also have more creative ways to connect.

For example, PandaDoc mid-market account executive Catlyn Leavengood explains that marketing teams frequently review virtual sales calls. This helps marketers understand customer use cases, learn which sales enablement materials help, and why deals move forward.

As Marie explains, Livestorm has a dedicated Slack channel so marketing and sales teams can both see when new business is won. Another channel notifies team members when business is lost, including the reasons why. Teams can then use these reasons to improve their sales and marketing strategies.

In addition, Livestorm's "Live My Life" program helps create empathy and understanding between the two teams. It gives sales and marketing team members insight into what the other is working on, how to do the job, and where the biggest challenges happen.

Livestorm for sales and marketing communication

Marketing and sales alignment depends on consistent communication — which requires a reliable platform. With Livestorm's internal communication software, you can:

• Host regular meetings between sales and marketing
• Record and share sales calls with the marketing team
• Plan recurring events for weekly and monthly check-ins
• Get to know colleagues better to create a sense of teamwork

Ready to bridge the gap between your sales and marketing teams? Sign up for Livestorm](https://app.livestorm.co/#/signup) and set up your first meeting in minutes.