5 Ways to Create an Alignment Between Marketing and Sales

Posted by Mary Coombs on July 19,2014

To achieve alignment, you need an agreement. Sales and Marketing are on the same team. Okay, let’s be 8ceb4538-729f-46f1-9932-2c56f0189fa5honest: At most companies, it doesn’t actually feel that way. According to a Corporate Executive Board study, 87% of the terms Sales and Marketing use to describe each other are negative. According to our own research, 59% of marketers admit that they have no formal agreement with sales to determine both teams’ responsibilities, so it’s no wonder that sales and marketing alignment isn’t happening.

Figuring out how to unify sales and marketing isn't easy. But once you figure out the basics, you've opened the doors to tremendous opportunities for growth and learning.

1. Agree on Company Buyer Personas


Buyer Personas help Marketing and Sales internalize the ideal customer they’re trying to attract, and relate to their customers as real humans. Understanding the agreed-upon buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.

“41% of marketers do not use buyer personas”

- LinkedIn and HubSpot’s Sales & Marketing Love Story Survey, 2014

2. Use Your Professional Brand To Engage The Right Audience.

A great way to increase your professional brand is to make sure your LinkedIn profile is up-to-date and optimized.  Read What's the Future of Social Selling? to get more information on how to use LinkedIn for online lead generation and your professional brand.

3. Get Marketing and Sales to Sign up for a Number

Sales is driven by quota -- a numerical goal that ties directly to their compensation and job security. The marketing department should not only have a concrete goal in order to drive strategy and reporting, but also make sure they’re setting a concrete, numerical marketing goal that aligns with the sales team’s mentality.

4. Communicate, Celebrate, and Address the Achievement (or Lack Thereof) of Those Numerical Goals

Communicating how each team is tracking toward their goals maintains transparency. Addressing when either team is not reaching those goals, confirms their importance, and celebrating when the teams do hit their goals keeps them motivated.

5. Come to an Agreement Between the Two Teams About What Each is Accountable For to the Other

This is what we call a Sales and Marketing Service Level Agreement (SLA) and it details both the marketing goal (such as number of leads, number of qualified leads, or revenue pipeline) and the sales activity (follow up with leads generated by Marketing) that each team commits to in order to support the other.

For more information about unifying marketing and sales and all things inbound read: