Why Aligning Sales and Marketing Will Boost Your Sales

Organizations that align sales and marketing close more deals and increase revenue in three ways:

1. Marketing produces more qualified leads
2. Sales close a higher percentage of those leads (even when compared to the qualified leads they produce today)
3. Both sales and marketing spend less time closing each deal and are thereby able to work on more deals simultaneously

The pains of non-aligned sales and marketing

Below are the most common pain points we come across. Which ones do you recognize?

• Marketing does a lot of seemingly good work, but does it actually lead to more sales?
• So many tools, which ones to use and for what purpose?
• Are your salespeople actually becoming more efficient by working with marketing, or just distracted by all the unqualified leads and new administrative processes?

Bottom line is this: If your marketing people focus on their goals without considering sales’ goals, and if sales just focus on closing deals rather than thinking systematically about how to become more efficient, you will have a lot of wasted effort.

So what does this “alignment” actually mean, and how does it look like in practice?

Introducing Structsales’ Unified Business Model™ for Sales and Marketing Alignment

From our experience, the biggest hurdle to aligning sales and marketing is that most organizations lack a shared view of what it actually looks like. They iterate and experiment with different approaches, but nobody really knows what they’re striving for in the long run. They end up where they happen to end up. Usually, that’s different places depending on who you ask.

Now imagine if someone could simply hand you a model which describes how an ideal sales and marketing model looks. A model that everybody could understand and strive for, and which describes each of the roles, KPIs and processes for marketing as well as for sales.

This is exactly what we’re planning to do.

In a series of 10 blog posts, we will give you a step-by-step guide to fully aligning your sales and marketing organization. The model is developed by us but incorporates well-known and best practices from proven sources, and tested by us on many of our clients. The extraordinary results achieved by organizations who implement these best practices speak for themselves.

We will start by showing you the entire sales and marketing alignment model in the next blog post, and then delve deeper into each specific part in upcoming posts. Click on the link to continue reading, or see the list of all blog posts in the series in this guide to sales and marketing alignment listing.