by Team Avista
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by Team Avista
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Aligning the needs of sales and marketing teams may seem like a given, but the collaboration between the two often becomes a back-burner task. In an increasingly siloed environment, companies without aligned sales and marketing are missing a massive growth and profitability margin. According to Forrester, statistics support the theory; companies with strong alignment between these two functions experience 19% faster growth and a 15% increase in profitability. This alignment, also known as “Smarketing,” offers a game-changer for businesses looking to drive bigger and better results.
What Does Sales and Marketing Alignment Mean?
Eighty-five percent of companies say sales and marketing alignment is the largest opportunity for improving business performance, but what does that mean? Sales and marketing alignment ensures these two teams work towards shared goals and strategies. When sales and marketing teams collaborate closely, they can create a more cohesive approach to lead generation, nurturing and sales conversion, improving efficiency and boosting the company’s overall performance. The three key elements needed for proper alignment include communicating to establish:
- Common Objectives: Both teams should understand and agree on key business goals.
- Messaging Consistency: Sales and marketing teams need aligned messages delivered to prospects and customers.
- Shared KPIs: Establishing shared key performance indicators (KPIs) helps ensure both teams move toward the same outcomes.
What Is Smarketing?
“Smarketing” takes sales and marketing alignment to the next level. It is the term used to describe the complete integration and communication of sales and marketing efforts. It combines marketing’s ability to generate leads with sales’ expertise in closing deals. When aligned, sales processes become more seamless, and marketing efforts are better targeted. While each team will still have unique key performance indicators (KPIs), the ultimate goal should be to reduce friction and champion customer-centricity. Transparency is the foundation of smarketing, meaning all goals should be openly discussed and rooted in enhancing the customer experience.
Benefits of Smarketing:
- Fewer Unqualified Leads: With better collaboration, marketing delivers higher-quality leads, and sales can focus on prospects with a higher likelihood of converting.
- Higher Sales Win Rates: Aligned teams can better target their efforts, improving conversion rates and closing more deals.
- Shorter Buying Cycles: By nurturing leads properly and passing them along at the right time, both teams accelerate the path to purchase.
- Easier Deal Closings: Sales teams receive well-qualified leads from marketing, allowing them to close deals faster and with more confidence.
- Increased Customer Retention Rates: A unified approach ensures customers have a consistent experience across touchpoints, enhancing loyalty.
- Faster Revenue Growth: With improved alignment and efficiency, both teams contribute to a swifter and more sustainable revenue growth.
Unlike the funnel of general sales and marketing run separately, smarketing produces a consistent customer experience that attracts, engages and delights buyers on a unified front, creating lasting relationships and driving business outcomes.
The Importance of Transparent Support
Sales and marketing teams must work in close collaboration to drive business growth. Each team plays a critical role in the other’s success, and when aligned with transparent communication, they can maximize lead generation, qualification and conversion efforts.
Marketing’s Role Within Sales
Marketing is largely responsible for generating and nurturing leads, providing sales teams with the tools and insights they need to turn leads into customers.
- Lead Generation: Through advertising, content marketing, SEO and other inbound strategies, marketing creates valuable leads that sales teams can follow up on.
- Lead Qualification: Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) are those who meet specific criteria, indicating that they are ready for sales outreach.
- Lead Nurturing: Marketing keeps prospects engaged through email campaigns, social media and other touchpoints, ensuring leads are guided to the purchase.
- Data and Insights: By leveraging CRM systems, marketing provides valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences, which helps sales teams tailor their outreach.
Sales’ Role Within Marketing
While marketing generates and nurtures leads, the sales team seals the deal, guiding leads to the purchase. Sales teams provide valuable feedback to improve lead quality, messaging and conversions.
- Lead Quality: Sales teams assess whether the leads generated by marketing are high-quality and worth pursuing, ensuring that marketing can adjust its lead qualification criteria accordingly.
- Messaging: Sales teams offer insights into what messaging resonates best with prospects, helping marketing fine-tune its campaigns and content.
- Conversion Data: Using CRM tools, sales teams track which leads convert into customers, providing marketing with real-world data to evaluate the effectiveness of their efforts and adjust strategies as needed.
Case Study: Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Sales Success
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) aimed to enhance sales activation with its partners by demonstrating the value of these partnerships and supporting its HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform. To achieve this, HPE collaborated with Avista to de-silo sales and marketing efforts and develop a program called “Will to Win,” which featured sales success stories highlighting the competitive advantages of working with partners like Cohesity, Commvault, and CTERA. Aligning their message to showcase “better together” language, Avista helped to rework their customer reference database for global sales teams, complemented by “Anatomy of a Win” books designed to empower partner field teams.
Within a few quarters, the program delivered over 60 success stories and nine partner-specific books, fostering greater collaboration between HPE and its partners. These tools drove increased deal success, strengthened HPE’s sales pipeline, and converted more than 50% of the stories into co-branded customer case studies, emphasizing the tangible benefits of aligned sales efforts.
By maintaining open communication and feedback loops, both teams can continuously improve all efforts, leading to better-qualified leads, higher conversion rates and ultimately increased business success.
Problems Solved
Misalignment between sales and marketing often results in challenges that stifle business growth, such as wasted resources, poor lead conversion, inconsistent messaging and inefficient communication. Marketing may invest time in ineffective campaigns while sales chase unqualified leads, leading to frustration and communication breakdowns. Without proper lead nurturing, sales teams struggle to convert prospects into customers, and conflicting messages from the two teams can confuse and alienate potential buyers. In general, a lack of collaboration creates silos, resulting in missed opportunities and slower progress, but by adopting smarketing principles, companies can avoid these common mistakes before they wreak havoc.
Sales and marketing alignment is a critical driver of business growth and profitability, and 87% of sales and marketing leaders agree. Only when businesses de-silo, align goals, leverage the right tools, and ensure effective communication and collaboration, will companies create a seamless customer experience and achieve accelerated revenue growth.
Would you like to learn more about aligning your sales and marketing teams for the ultimate smarking results? An Avista expert would love to connect with you to explore your best options. Contact us today and turn your company’s marketing and sales inefficiency into visible growth.
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