Alignment between Marketing and Sales is potentially the largest opportunity for improving business performance today. When marketing and sales teams unite around a single buyer's journey, they dramatically improve marketing ROI, sales productivity, and, most importantly, top-line growth.

1. 6WAYS TO ACHIEVE
SALES & MARKETING
ALIGNMENT
THROUGHOUT THE BUYER'S JOURNEY

2. only 8% of B2B companies have achieved
effective sales and marketing alignment*.
Although department leaders believe there's much to
be gained from teams working together to increase
lead flow and generate revenue.
*According to a report by Forrester Research

3. why doesn't it happen?

4. impossible to achieve!
they say…

5. Here are
6 ways
to achieve
sales and marketing
alignment
I say.

6. CREATE JOINT SALES AND MARKETING GOALS
Help each team understand exactly what is expected and hold them
accountable to concrete, shared, numerical goals.
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Calculate both the marketing and sales metrics and provide frequent reporting for each.
Make sure you review your metrics and make them accessible to everyone to maintain
transparency and improve communication between teams.
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2
3

7. Lead Conversion Metrics:
• Lead to Contact %
• Contact to Appointment Held %
• Appointment to Close %
• Lead Creation to Close Date
Sales Email Conversion Metrics:
• Send to Open %
• Send to Click %
• Send to Appt %
Here are some metrics you should be keeping track of:
CREATE JOINT SALES AND MARKETING GOALS
1

8. Manage a Single Source Database
2
Use customer relationship management software
that’s built on a single source database.
or, at the very least, operates on a bi-directional integration to ensure salespeople and marketers know where
prospects are in the sales cycle at all times. It's one of the things we like about HubSpot’s single source marketing
and sales platform.
For bi-directional integration, look to integration tools like Bedrock Data.

9. Manage a Single Source Database
2
The most successful teams
manage leads by lead status and deal stages.
Here are some examples of the statuses and stages we help
our clients implement and manage...
Lead Statuses:
• Attempting to Contact
• Contact Made
• Appointment Scheduled
• Appointment Held
• Open Deal
• Client
• Partner
• Send Back to Marketing
• Unqualified
• No Further Action
Deal Stages:
• Discovery Meeting
• Demo
• Follow-up Appointments
• Contracting & Negotiation
• Closed Won
• Closed Lost
• Stalled

10. Align Content with the Sales Process
3
Sales and marketing teams should
collaborate on content creation
Salespeople can provide insights into any gaps in the current content arsenal. As Salesforce puts it,
“sales leaders can serve as strategic advisors to content creators.” Over communicate about the
content being used and discuss the impact on customer engagement during sales interactions.

11. So Always be thoughtful and realistic about use cases.
you don’t want
marketing wasting time crafting content for sales
that will go unused !
It takes a significant amount of time to create content
Align Content with the Sales Process
3

12. Align Content with the Sales Process
3
To increase its effectiveness, ensure the content you’re
creating aligns with the buyer’s journey and speaks to the
awareness, consideration, and decision-making process
I need to increase
traffic to my site
I can use inbound
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should I hire?
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awareness
consideration
Decision

13. Streamline Content Management
4
Content management is one of the biggest obstacles sales and
marketing teams battle to overcome. Here are two of my
favorite tools teams can leverage to effectively
access and manage content:
WittyParrot:
WittyParrot is also a great tool for
m a n a g i n g a p p r o v e d c o n t e n t b e t w e e n
marketing and sales for prospecting and
responding to prospect questions and RFPs. It
allows you to manage content centrally in
the cloud and provides in-depth analytics.
Hubspot CRM:
The Hubspot CRM helps you organize marketing
collateral and sales messaging within the
template builder and document management
tool. You can use personalization tokens,
track performance, including metrics for
open rates, click throughs, and analytics on
the documents prospects looked at.

14. Provide Cross-Functional Training
5
Train sales on marketing
concepts and skill-sets that produce
winning campaigns. Help salespeople
understand how your company
engages customers at different
stages of the buyers journey. Conversely,
train marketers on selling
concepts and skills salespeople use
during each stage of the sales cycle,
from prospecting and follow-up to
closing.

15. Provide Cross-Functional Training
5
When both
sales and marketing
understand the way each other thinks
and develop an understanding of the skills that make each other successful,
teammates can learn to collaborate and leverage each other’s expertise to
win more new business.

16. Reward Your Team
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Don’t reward each department individually. Instead, focus
on what your sales and marketing teams accomplish
together and reward them jointly. This will encourage
more communication and collaboration between teams.
Some possible rewards include:
• Bonuses
• Team retreats
• Leadership opportunities
• Paid time off
• Gift certificates
• Happy hour

17. The Changing Face of
Sales and Marketing
By understanding the sales process and creating marketing
campaigns that support it, customers advance more quickly
through the sales process to help you close bigger deals faster.
working in alignment gives marketing and sales
teams a significant advantage.
Sales-driven marketing puts egos aside and allows sales to
drive the business forward with marketing providing support
around the sales strategy.

18. Read the original article written by
ON
Doyle Slayton