5 Symptoms of Alignment Gaps Between Your Sales & Marketing

5 symptoms (and hidden causes) of profit-killing alignment gaps between your sales & marketing.

Your sales team has never been busier. Your website has been redesigned and is looking good. Your marketing department has been feverishly producing marketing collateral, ads and social media posts. You’re spending money on events and promotions and making a lot of contacts.

So, where’s the profit growth these efforts should have sparked?

Is misalignment to blame?

Here are five symptoms that suggest your sales and marketing efforts are not aligned, along with the likely causes and best practices for closing the gaps.

Promotions

While they need to look good, the effectiveness of your website, marketing materials and campaigns relies on how well your content resonates with your target markets.

To achieve this, marketing needs to be in tune with the market and its requirements. That’s why it’s critical for marketing to talk to end-users, channel partners, market influencers—and your sales team.

Your sales team is in the trenches every day. They hear all the issues, concerns and fears of your market. They hear what your competitors are up to. That’s why it’s critical that their input is incorporated into all marketing promotions.

After all, the purpose of your marketing promotions is to make it easier to make a sale. How can you do this if marketing is not collaborating with sales in their creation? And—unless you get lucky—no marketing campaign will be successful without timely and coordinated sales follow-up.

Once co-created materials are in place, qualifying the leads coming in is critical to converting them into sales—and to avoid wasting time on leads that should be disqualified as soon as possible. To do so, your sales and marketing team need to work together to establish criteria for defining what characteristics differentiate a suspect (someone who expresses interest but is not serious) from a prospect (someone with serious interest and worth the effort of cultivating a relationship). We believe lead qualification/disqualification is best performed by inside sales. Qualified leads should either be closed by inside sales or, if it’s a longer sales cycle, the lead may be passed to outside sales or a channel partner.

Products (and services)

Finding new ways to satisfy requirements of the market creates innovation. To do so, you need to understand the needs of your end-user target markets. This is best performed by product managers within the marketing department, who then incorporate this information into your product roadmap and the new product development process.

How do product managers stay in tune with the market? It’s important for them to get out into the field to speak with end-users, channel partners and influencers. Sales can make these conversations happen and acquire competitive intelligence (pricing, new products coming out, channel practices, etc.). Their input is also crucial in the product development process because they speak with prospects and clients every day.

Sales is also key for beta testing new products. Beta testing is the process of testing prototypes in the field to identify bugs and other issues before launch. Sales can help set up beta testers (often existing users or strategically important prospects), handle logistics and obtain the feedback that marketing needs to finalize new products and launch them with confidence.

Once new products are launched, marketing can help sales by “productizing” the initial needs assessment that sales conducts for each prospect. Marketing can ensure these needs assessments are comprehensive, structured, contain reporting and recommendations, are repeatable—and can be charged for instead of sales giving away this service for free. (No more leaving money on the table).

Overall results

Collaboration between sales and marketing is key to alignment, with both sides alternating as the lead and support.

But communication and collaboration between sales and marketing staff is just the beginning of a truly effective strategy.

True alignment requires understanding and leveraging the deep expertise that each side brings, and ensuring that every effort aligns with best practices for both sides.

For every effort led by the sales team, the marketing team should provide close support—and vice versa. While sales teams can take the lead in efforts around placement and pricing, the marketing team should offer direct support. Likewise, your marketing team can steer efforts around product and promotions, but sales teams should be in an active, supporting role.

Collaboration between sales and marketing