Since we all know what closing more deals means for an agency, it's clearly worth it to invest the time, energy, and money into sales and marketing operations alignment. And, the sooner, the better.
However, this is always easier said than done, right? If you've seen breakdowns in communication in your sales and marketing teams and experienced problems as a result of misalignment, this article is for you.
This article will present the top ways you can create better alignment between your sales and marketing operations teams. That way, you can become one of those agencies that is up to 67% better at closing deals.
1. Streamline communications and order/workflow processes for sales and marketing operations alignment
A recent study shows that communication is the greatest challenge for sales and marketing alignment.
This probably doesn't come as a shock to anyone working at an agency. When communication is smooth and everyone is on the same page, it's easy to take the customer from the point of sale all the way through the customer journey with ease.
Agencies most often run into problems when communication fails. For example, if a salesperson doesn't accurately convey all the details of a sale to marketing ops and, similarly, if sales team members don't have complete visibility into fulfillment operations after the fact, it's easy to make mistakes.
So, what is the solution?
The solution is to outline clear communication processes for sales and marketing ops, and adopt an automated system that will help guide your team members through the processes.
Interestingly enough, only 30% of CMOs have a clear process or program to make sales and marketing alignment a priority.
While aligning communications is obviously daunting (based on the statistic mentioned above), it doesn't have to be.
A tool (like TapClicks) that brings orders, marketing operations, analytics, and reporting into one centralized location will solve the problem of communication mishaps.
Rather than wondering what the details of an order are, a marketing operations team member can login to the platform and see all the details and notes pertaining to that particular customer. Similarly, a sales person that has a question about workflow can login to the same system and monitor order fulfillment progress as well as view any notes in the account.
Not to mention, when an order is complete, everyone has the same visibility into campaign analytics and reporting, clearing up any questions about performance.
An order, workflow, analytics and reporting tool fosters collaboration, eliminates errors that come from manually passing on information, provides complete visibility, and allows for communication to occur in one, centralized location.
2. Invest in closed-loop reporting
It's easy to think about data and reporting in silos. In other words, it's easy for sales teams to focus solely on KPI related to sales. Additionally, it's common for marketing ops teams to focus on KPIs about campaign performance.
When looking at the growth goals of your agency, however, you look at both the sales data and marketing data together.
Adopting a closed-loop reporting method helps everyone at your agency focus on data that marketing is collecting in a marketing automation system and the data that a sales team is collecting from a CRM as well as any other important business KPIs.
When everyone on your team has visibility into all important bits of data, it's easier to identify not just how many leads you are converting or the productivity of your marketing team, but what drives the greatest ROI for your agency.
The solution is to invest in a tool that integrates all data sources into one platform. That way, you have access to all the information you need to make better business decisions for your agency.
3. Redefine collaboration
Collaboration is traditionally thought in terms of teams coming together to identify goals and KPIs that will measure the results of your goals. Successful collaboration may mean looking at the sales funnel as well as the marketing operations process to see what needs to happen to foster business growth.
Sales and marketing ops working together to identify key goals and KPIs is a great place to start, but what if you took it even further? What if, instead of thinking about the goals of your sales team and the goals of your marketing ops team, you combined the two to look at the goals of your business operations team (both teams combined into one).
Before delving too deep into what this means, let's look at some reasons why this might be a good idea. According to Hubspot, when teams accomplish collaborative work, it leads to a boost in business results:
- Companies with mature lead generation and management practices have 9.3% higher sales quota achievement rates.
- Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases in profits by 25-95%.
- Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.
To achieve any of the results listed above, it requires collaboration from marketing, sales, marketing ops, and executives with the foresight to invest in winning tools and processes.
Sales and marketing operations alignment means bringing people together into agreement and cooperation. What better way to do that then to redefine collaboration? In other words, investing in the tools that bring your sales team and CRM data together with your marketing ops teams and workflow information makes it possible to approach business decisions from one common resource. That way, every business decision you make comes as a result of both sales and marketing ops working together toward the same goals.
Wrap Up
Sales and marketing operations alignment is integral to the success of any agency. When you invest in the right tools to help you streamline communications and orders/workflows, invest in closed-loop reporting, and redefine collaboration to drive business results, you'll find you're well on your way to seeing higher ROIs.
Is there anything we missed? What would you add to the list? We'd love to hear from you in the comments.
