Alignment Leads To Success

Align your sales and marketing

To drive significant results from your sales and marketing, it's imperative to close the gap between your sales and marketing objectives, and centralise their plans. A market driven business needs to investigate and implement an integrated strategy that truly reflects the stages of the customer's buying journey through the sales pipeline.

A truly customer focused business needs to plan and take into account the rates of conversion and time lag in decision making, and reflecting the contributions of both sales and marketing to generating revenues and gaining new customers.

Steps to building a sales and marketing strategy

This strategy is designed for businesses with a centralised marketing function and active sales teams, in order to create a cohesive sales and marketing plan.

It will help your business differentiate itself in the market.

The utilised approach can be outlined as follows:

Step 1: Business Objectives

Define the business objectives and direction which the sales and marketing strategies are supporting. Ensure definite clarity and understanding.

Step 2: Target Market

Broad customer segmentation completed, including demographic profiles, purchasing behaviour, needs and value proposition.

Step 3: Definition of Solution

Define the solution offered to and desired by each of the customer segments, and range of services that should be offered as such.

Step 4: Strategic Position

Against the key brand values and desired outcomes by customers (for example: price, speedy turnaround, high quality), define the position that the business should occupy within the marketplace. Perform a competitor overview analysis, comparing relative key strengths and weaknesses to identify opportunities – SWOT analysis. Such a thorough review will lead to the definition of a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) relative to other companies, which can be emphasised in your marketing and sales activities.

Step 5: Identify Marketing Objectives and Alignment with Sales Objectives

Based on the defined business objectives, customer segmentation / value and percentage of repeat business, you will need to model the number of new customers and retention rate of these customers that are required to achieve the revenue objectives of the business.

Step 6: Marketing Strategy

A broad strategic framework will need to be outlined. This should include the identification of all the key marketing channels, the objective behind their planned implementation, and the integration between these channels. Channels will include:

• Online

• Email

• Direct mail

• Events

• Social media

• SEM

• Advertising

• Sponsorship

• Surveys / questionnaires

Step 7: Marketing Plan and Campaign Development

A marketing plan must be developed. This plan must be aligned with both the sales activities and overall business objectives of the business.

A pipeline model will need to be used, so as to determine the objectives for each step of the individual campaigns, with specific defined goals for both sales and marketing.