How To Boost Sales and Marketing Effectiveness

February 15, 2023 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

Excited colleagues doing a fist bump, concept for sales and marketing effectiveness.

The common disconnect we see so often between sales and marketing has been going on for far too long. At this point, it’s important to understand that sales and marketing effectiveness is highest when they work together. But for companies that still have friction between departments, alignment is much easier said than done. In this guide, we’re covering how to bring your marketing and sales teams together with the following topics:

Importance of Aligning Sales and Marketing
What Factors Affect Sales and Marketing Effectiveness?
How To Boost Sales and Marketing Effectiveness

Importance of Aligning Sales and Marketing

Image via iStock by Evgeny Gromov

With communication challenges rising in multi-departmental organizations, it’s critical to ensure sales and marketing align to create the most beneficial outcomes for your business. If marketing teams are left to fend for themselves with little contact across teams, it can lead to mistakes, data silos, and unnecessary costs to your business. With higher sales and marketing effectiveness, your business benefits from:

Increase Customer Acquisition Rates

A large part of sales and content marketing effectiveness comes back to the ability to directly relate to a customer. Personalization is an extremely effective strategy, and aligning your marketing and sales departments can help your teams better outline your ideal customers. From there, you’re able to create high-impact marketing and sales campaigns to target your most engaged audiences. Once your teams come together to pinpoint the correct target audience for your business, you’ll be in a much better position to utilize leading strategies from both marketing and sales.

Related reading: The Complete Guide to Customer Acquisition

Improve Customer Retention Rates

When either marketing or sales oversell a product, a customer is in for a disappointing realization. And there’s no faster way to lose a customer’s business than to disappoint them. When you align your sales and marketing teams, though, your messaging will hit home every single time. No one will overpromise or underpromise. Because of this, you’ll have better chances of boosting customer satisfaction with your brand’s products or services. And this further increases the chances of new customers becoming repeat customers.

Boost Revenue and Stay Ahead of Your Competition

Increased acquisition rates, cheaper lead generation, and higher retention rates lead to better ROI. Once you ensure that content marketing and sales effectiveness are as streamlined as possible, everything else will follow.

Especially considering the rising competition that businesses are currently facing, you need to make sure you’re beating out your competitors at every single turn. Sales and content marketing are often a customer’s first point of contact with your business. If you give off a bad impression or demonstrate misalignment, customers won’t hang around to give you a second chance.

What Factors Affect Sales and Marketing Effectiveness?

Sales and content marketing effectiveness does not exist in a vacuum. There is never going to be a perfect month where every single factor lines up, and we see dazzling success. Instead, success in these departments is about knowing what we can control, and minimizing what we can’t. There are a number of internal and external factors that impact content marketing and sales effectiveness.

Internal Factors

Budgets: The total budget you allocate to these teams will impact everything they do. Be sure to divide your budget up fairly across these departments to avoid resentment or frustration.
Product and service offerings: If your product or service isn’t solving a problem, sales and marketing effectiveness can suffer. No matter how good your teams are, they need a great offer to deliver to customers.
Pricing: Equally, pay attention to consumer feedback on your price. Is it fair for what you’re offering?

External Factors

Economic cycle: Consumers have more disposable income when they’re not in a recession. Economic cycles heavily impact consumerism and the success your departments will experience.
Competition: If a competitor is able to offer a better product or service, your content marketing and sales effectiveness will suffer.
Regulations: Laws and regulations—like minimum pricing requirements for certain products and services—can impact the strategies that your sales and marketing departments use.

While you can control the internal factors, the external influences are mostly out of your control. That’s why it’s so important to align your sales and marketing teams early. This allows them to then tackle internal problems right away and make any adjustments they need to. Once they’ve done this, they’ll be in a much better position to collaborate effectively.

How To Boost Your Sales and Marketing Effectiveness

Boosting your sales and content marketing effectiveness starts with realigning these teams. Stop thinking of these departments as rivals or just getting in the way of one another. These departments should work like a well-oiled machine, helping customers along their journey and helping everyone to succeed. Here are some top strategies that you can use to bring these teams together.

1. Create a Single Customer Journey.

When businesses have separate sales and marketing funnels, it can cause confusion when identifying and segmenting leads throughout the customer journey. But with a single, targeted customer journey, not only do you make things simpler, but you also help defeat data silos. Data silos are blocks of information that are only accessible to certain departments. If your marketing team has a unique user funnel, the data it collects won’t be visible to your sales team. This can lead to huge problems down the line.

Getting rid of data silos should be a top priority for your business. Once you combine the marketing and sales funnel, everyone will have access to customer data, leading to better messaging and higher conversions.

2. Clarify Who You’re Targeting

In order to boost cohesion between marketing and sales, you need to be sure that everyone is targeting the same ideal customer. As the concept of an ideal customer is something that you’ll develop so early on in a business, it can change and become misconstrued over time. This isn’t a huge problem, but if these two departments are going after completely different customers, then you’re setting all those potential consumers up for disappointment.

Just think, a marketing team could consider a new lead as top-tier quality. But when sales talks to them, they might find that the customer isn’t actually meeting any of the necessary criteria. This comes back to misalignment and can slow down onboarding, decrease customer satisfaction, and lead to tensions between departments.

A great way to coordinate these teams on who their ideal customer appears to be is simply by jumping on a call. If your head of marketing and head of sales discuss their ideal buyer persona, you can quickly spot the differences. By working together, teams can better created targeted communications that lead to more engagement and interest from your audience.

3. Keep Messaging Consistent

As your company develops, your capacity to offer new products or services to customers should also increase. While this is wonderful for your company’s longevity, it can create some messaging issues if you don’t scale with caution.

Double-check that the messaging that your sales and marketing teams are using aligns well. At its most simple, check that everyone is using the same names for products. At its most complex, your marketing and sales teams should align their messaging in terms of what each service or product offers. Be sure to keep messaging consistent across each channel your brand uses to connect with customers.

4. Create Joint KPIs

Nothing brings people together like working on a common goal. For marketing and sales teams, the typical KPIs that are on the table can have overlaps but will be fundamentally different. While marketing may focus on generating 500 new leads over the next month, for example, sales might focus on gaining a 10% increase in renewal contracts. But even though these KPIs may target different goals, there’s still some overlap in how both marketing and sales teams can achieve them.

So instead of treating marketing and sales as two completely different departments, you can boost collaboration and effectiveness by setting common KPIs. As these fields are closely tied, there are a number of performance indicators you can establish:

Customer Retention: While both marketing and sales focus on bringing new customers into your business, that doesn’t mean their journey ends there. Take a look at where you’re losing business to see exactly where these departments can bolster their efforts.
Cost per Customer Acquisition: This figure takes into account every step of marketing, plus each new sales phase. It’s a coordinated effort that both sales and marketing effectiveness can improve.
Cost per Lead: This allows you to measure content marketing and sales effectiveness and shows you how much it costs to secure a new lead.

While these are only a few suggestions, they’re excellent starting points. And the more overlap there is between both sales and marketing, the more likely they are to work together to boost the efficiency of your company.

Sales and Content Marketing Effectiveness Starts With Teamwork

Sales and marketing aren’t two different industries. They complement each other, work together, and drive results when moving in sync. And by improving your brand’s sales and marketing effectiveness, you can ensure your brand’s customer acquisition funnel is as strong as possible.

Lauren Oliver

Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress