Sales and Marketing Alignment The Results

25th April 2019

-I do believe the modern sales leader has to be a marketer.

Matt Gorniak The last few articles in my blog have looked more closely into sales and marketing alignment, what it is, why it matters and how to get it. Today's blog post is delving more deeper into your aspirations for a successful sales and marketing alignment. Understanding that you have to be both an excellent marketer and excellent sales person is important to your business growth. It might feel daunting at time, especially to come out of your comfort zone but ultimately, you want to continue to work in your business not for someone else. -I aspire to have sales and marketing cycle all lined up. Often business owners don't see the benefit of allowing sales to feedback into marketing. I've been told many times that sales and marketing is a linear process, but in truth it involves so much more. Marketing helps to create prospects, prospects become sales, sales drive feedback, feedback helps you understand what's great about your product, which in turn helps you understand what to talk about when marketing. A fully aligned sales and marketing cycle. Having the system so aligned that it can be automated or have minimum involvement from yourself gives time back to spend on the business, not in your business. But it involves trust and confidence, trust that the process will work and confidence to use the data. For example, you might be using SPANCOP to successfully align your sales and marketing. Your sales funnel will show the number of sales you need to reach your financial goals but if SPANCOP is showing a feast and famine or the bottle neck situation, then your sales and marketing are clearly not aligned. -Can I get time back using a process to fulfil my business aspiration? Getting into business for most people was because of an aspiration to create a product, or service, that people enjoyed and allowed them greater financial and working freedom, but often the working freedom just never happens. This is because company owners don't understand the need for automation in processes such as sales and marketing alignment. On the flip side automation can be a confusing word, it gives the impression that in a process everything can and will take care of itself. But automation for sales and marketing alignment is the movement of data by the user allowing for processes to be simplified. Let's take Facebook as an example. Using the Ad Manager, Facebook allows you to market to your chosen audience, while consistently giving feedback/data on those that have viewed the content, and furthermore consistently updating the target market. This is a perfect example of sales and marketing alignment within an automated process. -Don't forget the feedback, aspire to make that your number one goal. I've talked a lot about automation and the data gained within the sales and marketing process, but none of this is possible without giving feedback on the customer's behaviour and the use of data. Customer data such as the cost to market that product or service, what marketing convinced them to buy, how many sales meetings were involved, how long it took to buy and additional feedback that your sales and marking alignment process needs. This information is key to allowing sales to influence marketing and helping create a sales and marketing cycle. It's about connecting the dots and allowing the process to lead to a sales outcome. Don't get too caught up in the data, trust your cycle and allow the automation to take the information from one phase to the next. Next Steps To gain more information on aligning your sales and marketing head over to my website and join my blog. You will receive a FREE download that will give you key help and guidance on getting started with making sales and marketing work for each other. You can also start your sales improvement journey from just £10 over in my available courses page! Check it out and see what's there to help you!