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5 Key Benefits of Sales and Marketing Effort Alignment in SaaS Companies
There’s little doubt that SaaS marketing keeps getting trickier and trickier. Generating a sufficient number of high-quality leads at reasonable costs is everyone’s dream, but to make it real, you’ll need to cover a lot of ground.
Somewhere really high on your to-do list, you should have “marketing and sales effort alignment”. If you don’t have this as a priority, chances are you’re literally burning a lot of your marketing budget away without noticing.
What does alignment between sales and marketing teams mean? And why does a SaaS business need it? Read further to keep your money safe and good leads coming.
What It Means To Have Sales And Marketing Teams Alignment
In the past, SaaS sales and marketing teams have operated separately. Depending on the business, teams worked in different offices, employed various technologies, and even had various objectives.
The benefits of sales and marketing alignment are there to help your teams work more effectively by improving communication and transparency. The ultimate objective is to generate more high-quality leads that will result in more high-profit sales.
In most cases, the alignment process is about destroying barriers existing between the two teams. And when the barriers are gone, the alignment makes itself evident through the sales and marketing teams’ common understanding of the business client acquisition strategy, process and culture.
Benefits Of Sales And Marketing Alignment For SaaS Companies
1. Better Action Plan
Businesses that have their sales and marketing departments well aligned are typically strong in developing an efficient strategy – their long-term planning ability improves massively.
Apart from that, when sales and marketing share a good understanding of how your business operates and how it best can generate revenue, they also get good at rolling out great initiatives aimed at attaining big objectives – not just coming up with big objectives themselves.
2. Better Customer Journey Map
For SaaS companies, a big challenge is establishing a clear-cut customer journey. And usually, both sales and marketing departments have two different puzzle pieces – marketing sees customer behavior at the start of the sales cycle and sales will, hopefully, get to see it off to the very end of the cycle, which is the purchase itself.
That’s why, on a company level, you can only properly define the entire customer journey if sales and marketing communicate with each other well by sharing valuable information they’ve gathered through interacting with leads and clients.
3. Better Customer Understanding
In order to successfully close deals, marketing and sales must agree on their specific target audience. When the teams collaborate, accurate customer profiles are simpler to generate.
Also keep in mind that, normally, at various times of the decision-making process on the customer side, more than one person is involved. Having an idea of who and when steps in is essential for a seamless transition between marketing and sales. It also helps if both sales and marketing are aware of the factors that will most likely affect customers at different phases of the sales process.
4. Better Customer Feedback Processing
Knowing what your potential and current customers think of your processes is vital in the SaaS industry, but this knowledge doesn’t always reach everyone who is involved in generating revenue. High-quality collaboration between marketing and sales increases the likelihood that customer feedback will be properly processed on all levels.
5. Better Sales and Marketing Engagement
When marketing and sales teams operate independently, neither team pays much attention to the other while they carry out their respective tasks. This may cause wasteful efforts and perplexing incidents for potential customers.
Conversely, when the two teams collaborate and have frequent discussions, they can assess each other’s performance and identify mutual flaws. Not to mention, the connection between the two departments also allows them to react swiftly when market dynamics change.
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How To Identify Marketing And Sales Alignment And Misalignment
For a SaaS company, sales and marketing alignment may be hard to achieve. And telling whether the business has indeed achieved it can be just as hard. So how do we know if some degree of misalignment still exists in your corporate culture?
When there’s some friction between the teams, these two metrics will likely show it:
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Conversion rate is lower than estimated. Your SaaS marketing team can be doing a brilliant job on the lead gen side, but if high-quality prospects are not converting to closed deals well enough, this can be a sign that the sales team isn’t fully aligned with the marketing people.
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Few incoming quality leads. Conversely, even if the sales team is outperforming itself, it may not matter – they just don’t have enough good leads to work with. These are usually so-called disqualified leads, those that are completely not what your sales team is expecting to process. These prospects may not possess the necessary budget to use your SaaS or they may have been misled by your initial message.
Sometimes debates between teams on who’s to blame get so heated that the team members tend to lose sight of the purpose of their collaboration. And instead of the alignment they attempt to achieve, we have a conflict over who is not listening to whom.
Sales And Marketing Teams Alignment Best Practices
Here are some of the most important things your SaaS business needs to do to ensure alignment:
1. Align on your CRM statuses
You’ll be surprised by how many SaaS companies have a big mess in their own backyard. Many marketing and sales teams suffer from a mutual misunderstanding of the leads’ statuses in the CRM as they advance through the stages of the sales cycle.
The two teams will be able to communicate more quickly and efficiently when statuses are precisely defined for both of them, while using the default ones without having a glossary may cause problems for your staff.
2. Evaluate Results Together
Create a platform for an honest discussion of what was achieved or not achieved. After you have established your CRM terminology, one more crucial step is to create a culture of common result evaluation.
Regular result analysis must take place, and ideally, this should be an open discussion. People from the sales and marketing departments are frequently observed to have a low level of mutual trust – so let’s start building this trust by looking at the same numbers together.
Such joint sessions usually result in extremely fruitful and helpful actions that build momentum – a great effort for any SaaS company to grow more swiftly and sustainably.
3. Let Marketing Observe Sales Calls
Your sales and marketing teams can work together effectively through cross-department shadowing, such as having members of the marketing team occasionally observe sales calls.
This not only teaches the marketing team how to best design campaigns to support the sales team, but it also gives the sales staff a fresh perspective on their daily tasks. The marketing team may be able to identify holes in the sales process, recommend more pertinent sales collateral to send prospects, and even identify consumer pain points the sales team had not thought of.
4. Hold Brainstorming Sessions
Plan regular brainstorming meetings as a method to bring sales and marketing together. The purpose of the brainstorming session can be to discuss potential customers, get rid of the grey areas in the sales process, or generate ideas for SaaS marketing activities, such as hosting webinars or creating whitepapers. Whatever the case, establish an agenda beforehand so that both parties may get ready and offer pertinent feedback.
How To Analyze Cross-Department Performance
Analyzing the success of your sales and marketing alignment strategies is easiest when using the right metrics:
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Sales Accepted Leads: when sales tell marketing that a lead looks like a good opportunity to explore;
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Not A Fit Leads: when sales reject a lead brought by marketing after talking to that lead;
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Disqualification Rate: a percentage of Disqualified Leads from the Total Lead Amount;
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Cost Per Demo: how much it costs, on average, to get a lead on a sales call/demo;
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Time To Contract: a period of time between the first touchpoint with the lead and the signing of the contract.
Conclusion
Achieving sales and marketing alignment for SaaS companies can be a mountain to climb. But starting with such simple steps as agreeing on your CRM statuses on a company level and having the marketing team listen to sales calls will go a long way. And instilling the culture of brainstorming and evaluating results together will also lower your chances of failure either in marketing or sales by quite a margin.