To achieve alignment, you need an agreement. Sales and Marketing are on the same team. Okay, let’s be
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.
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.
- LinkedIn and HubSpot’s Sales & Marketing Love Story Survey, 2014
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.
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.
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.
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: