For marketing to make a positive impact on your company, you can’t operate in silos.
Your marketing plan should not live in a vacuum. It should work together with your business’s strategic plan like a finely-turned, revenue-generating machine. For that to happen, marketing strategies must be aligned with your sales plan and overall business goals. Otherwise, organizational growth is just a pipe dream.
Accomplishing your business goals begins with getting sales and marketing on the same page. LinkedIn research shows that businesses with strong sales and marketing alignment are 67% more effective at closing deals and 58% better at retaining customers.
Follow these 5 tips to set yourself up for success:
1. Involve marketing in the business planning process from the beginning
Define your business goals and build your sales and strategic plans to reach them, then use this as a foundation upon which to build your marketing plan. When you know where you are going, it’s easier to determine how you will get there via your marketing efforts.
2. Bring it all together
Make certain every aspect of your marketing ties into and supports at least one business objective in the overall strategy of the company. This will ensure you’re spending time and money in the right places.
3. Work backward to move forward.
Yes, you read that right. To set marketing goals, you need to take a step back and think from the bottom up:
- Identify how much revenue your marketing needs to bring in to be in sync with a business goal
- Determine how many sales you need to hit the revenue you want
- Calculate your closing rate (divide sales by leads and multiply by 100) to figure out how many opportunities you’ll need to make the necessary number of sales
Now you know the number of opportunities your marketing needs to create to generate the sales necessary to get the revenue required to support the goal (deep breath). Okay, now you can move along.
4. Set meaningful marketing metrics
You not only need to decide on goals that generate a certain number of opportunities, but they should also be measurable and provide quantifiable results relevant to your business objectives.
It’s a good idea to set quarterly benchmarks as well, so you can analyze and make adjustments to your plan if necessary to keep alignment on track.
5. Determine your capabilities
Remember that well-oiled machine we talked about earlier? If you don’t have the capabilities to get things aligned, it’s like throwing dozens of wrenches into the machine! And that means bye-bye ROI. Aligning your marketing to your company goals is vital to growing your business.
Sales and marketing alignment needs to be more than just lip service. High-performing companies make it a way of life. It starts by getting the sales team and marketing department in the same room regularly. Monthly meetings are a great place to start.
If you don’t think you have the ability to make it happen for yourself, our final tip is to find someone who can help. Otherwise, you’ll be reading a blog like this a year from now and wonder why you missed the mark.
