Marketing and Sales Alignment: Challenges & Solutions

Sales and Marketing teams have traditionally worked as separate entities. The marketing team would identify prospects and filter them based on their readiness to buy, and pass them on to the sales team. The sales team would then take over and begin their efforts to close deals. However, as businesses matured, they started to recognize the need for collaboration between marketing and sales.

According to the American Marketing Association, “Sales and Marketing need to be integrated in order to build customer relationship, enhance brand, capitalize on leads, improve market share and to boost revenue”. While businesses do realize this, they are often unable to attain such an alignment because they face certain fundamental challenges in this regard:

• The Blame Game: Sales teams are driven by a quantitative objective. They are under immense pressure to demonstrate revenue. So most often than not they blame the marketing team for producing useless leads or for not producing enough leads. Similarly, marketing teams tend to think that they know better than the sales team, about prospects. And they in turn blame the sales team for not following-up on hot leads. This is the most common difference existing between sales and marketing teams in every organization. If both these teams collaborate and define leads and set expectations, this challenge can be effectively overcome.
• The Difference over Lead Nurturing: While marketing teams believe in strengthening prospect relationship, sales teams are always in a hurry to close the deal. In the recent years businesses have widely accepted the importance of lead nurturing for business growth. But sales teams are often unaware of its benefits. So, there is a pressing need to educate them about why lead nurturing is needed and typically how long should leads be nurtured.
• The Debate over Quality & Quantity:  This is another major challenge. Marketing teams believe that they always do a good job by providing more than the number of leads that a sales team needs, to meet their target. But sales teams always criticize marketing teams for not providing good quality leads. This ongoing debate has only widened the sales and marketing divide.

Marketing Automation: The Undisputed Solution

If there is one solution that can help marketing and sales teams integrate, it is Marketing Automation. The latest generation in automation software is based on the 2.0 platform, which offers advanced capabilities to make collaboration between marketing and sales much easier. These tools offer superior lead intelligence by identifying, capturing and converting leads into sales opportunities. They track visitor behavior on the website and measure their intent, interest levels etc. Based on these details, the leads are scored. And based on the scores, marketing teams can decide whether they have to be nurtured further, or handed over to the sales team. Only those leads with the highest score are taken over by sales and therefore the probability of conversion is very high.

Also, the sales and marketing automation software team together decide what would be the ideal lead score that can be considered sales-ready. By doing this, the gap is further reduced and better alignment between both teams can be achieved.

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