Why Marketing and Sales Absolutely Must Collaborate in B2B?

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While 90% of B2B decision-makers say they never respond to a sales prospecting call, 61% begin their purchasing consideration on Google.

B2B lead generation stats

This change in behavior means that sales prospecting is no longer just the business of the sales department. Marketing now plays a leading role in lead generation .

Concretely, marketing must generate qualified and mature leads and the sales department converts them.

Therefore, it is essential to align marketing and sales to achieve your goals.

To go further, here are 4 reasons to align sales and marketing in B2B .
What are the dangers of poor marketing and sales alignment?
You go to your favorite garage to change your tires and there, unpleasant surprise when it is morocco email list time to pick up the keys, he tells you that the wheels of your car are not aligned.

He warns you: poor wheel alignment, the famous lack of parallelism, can damage your steering, shock absorbers and increase the wear on your tires.

You can now proceed to checkout.

Misalignment between sales and marketing will inevitably have repercussions throughout your business.

misalignment sales and marketing loss of customers

65% of B2B companies say that poor collaboration between marketing and sales leads to lost business opportunities. Understanding customers.

To go further here, here are in detail the risks of a bad alignment between sales and marketing .
Aligning marketing and sales means setting complementary goals
So how can we encourage collaboration between the sales department and the marketing department?

The reason the two departments often have trouble getting along is because they are not wired to work together.

The sales department is under pressure from short-term objectives, while the marketing department is more about medium/long term.

To foster collaboration between sales and marketing, it is essential to start by setting complementary objectives for them.

Since the sales department needs to sign X new customers and to do this it needs to meet Y prospects, the marketing department will have to pass these Y prospects on to the sales department and therefore attract Z visitors to the website.

It's all about conversion rates.

Want to know more? Here’s our methodology for setting complementary goals for marketing and sales .
Aligning marketing and sales means working together on the profile of the ideal prospect
To summarize: marketing must generate qualified leads and sales must convert them.

For this to work perfectly, it is essential that marketing and sales work together to work on a common definition of what a qualified lead is.

We are talking about Buyer Persona.

The idea here is that marketing and sales together identify a list of criteria that characterize your ideal prospect, as well as the criteria that conversely characterize a bad prospect.

From then on, marketing will be able to pass on the best leads to the sales department and your leads > customers conversion rate will only improve.

To work on your ideal prospect profile, click here.
Aligning Marketing and Sales Means Committing to an SLA
To foster collaboration between marketing and sales, it is important that both departments have written commitments to each other.

For this, we recommend that you work on an SLA. A Service Level Agreement.

The SLA clearly defines how many leads marketing should pass to sales, and when and how sales should handle them.

Here we present our methodology for writing an SLA that truly promotes collaboration between sales and marketing .
Aligning marketing and sales means taking stock regularly
In conclusion, the alignment between sales and marketing is never final.

If you want the two departments to continue to collaborate effectively over time, it is essential to organize regular meetings between the two departments.

We are talking about Smarketing Meeting.

The purpose of a Smarketing Meeting is to allow the sales department and the marketing department to take stock of the leads generated, the leads converted and the problems encountered by both departments.

At the end of the Smarketing Meeting, the two departments left with some optimizations to make to their actions.