Aligned Marketing

Marketing alignment means alignment of marketing with sales. Marketing alignment is a shared system of communication, strategy, and goals that enable marketing and sales to operate as a unified organization. Aligned sales and marketing teams can deliver high-impact marketing activities, boost sales effectiveness, and ultimately grow revenue. Sales and marketing alignment is achieved when communication, strategy, and goals are unified. Working together, aligned marketing and sales teams can deliver high-impact marketing activities, boost sales effectiveness, and ultimately grow revenue. For sales efforts to be productive, it’s critical that salespeople have the training, context, and guidance they need to successfully engage customers.

Why is Aligned Marketing Important?

There are many organizational and business challenges that marketing and sales alignment can help solve. Here are just a few examples:

Lack of transparency into value of marketing content
Unreliable customer data and feedback
Unused sales content
Botched lead handoffs

Ultimately, the goal of marketing and sales alignment is to sync up the interdependent elements of sales, marketing, customer support, product management, brand management, legal, and human resources so as to boost seller productivity and improve your buyer’s experience.

Where do I begin to implement marketing and sales alignment?

Now that the importance of marketing and sales alignment has been established, how can you take the next step in achieving it in your organization? Here are a few places to begin:

Secure Leadership buy in and engagement
Share the goals for each team
Formalize regular strategy meetings and include performance updates
Agree on the process
Implement a sales enablement platform

What is the importance of sales enablement to marketing alignment?

Aligning your sales and marketing team is not the only critical component of a successful business organization. Sales enablement plays a critical role in developing your enterprise sales organization beyond a few top achievers. Enterprise sales enablement provides all salespeople with the best practices, knowledge, tools, and resources required to be successful. An overwhelming majority of organizations experience significant growth in their sales as a result of enterprise sales enablement. What’s more, organizations with sales enablement achieve a far better win rate on their forecasted deals, compared to businesses without it.

The importance of enterprise sales enablement comes down to the fact that salespeople are more likely to succeed in closing deals if they have the necessary tools, knowledge, practice, and resources. Showpad’s sales enablement platform helps sales and marketing teams collaborate efficiently to produce the content buyers need. The platform centralizes all sales collateral so it’s easy to access, update and share materials. Powerful analytics identify the most impactful content so marketing can focus on producing only the best, most relevant content for sales. This can result in a 25% increase in productivity. Forrester analyzed the costs associated with Showpad (including licensing, training and implementation) against the platform’s benefits over the course of three years. They found the platform shows a return on investment of 516%.

How can Showpad sales enablement software help to align marketing and sales?

Showpad is a global leader in revenue enablement technology, providing teams with a modern selling solution for maximizing hybrid sales. In more than 50 countries, customers rely on the Showpad platform to empower their teams to be at their best. Showpad has been named a Strong Performer by Forrester’s Wave for Sales Content Solutions, recognized as a top 10 software company by G2, and listed in Deloitte’s Fast 50 and Inc Magazine’s 2019 Best Workplaces.

Showpad will support your current needs and future growth because we help prepare sellers by making it easy to find the latest on-brand content in a central location for every opportunity. Showpad also supports sales onboarding, training, and coaching to maximize teams’ productivity, increase active selling time, and accelerate sales rep onboarding time.

Sellers can more effectively engage buyers by leveraging Showpad to more efficiently prepare for and personalize sales presentations. Sellers can easily share the most relevant content with buyers from any device and collaborate with all stakeholders in one branded location
By tracking their buyer’s level of interest through Showpad insights, sellers can optimize their performance, shorten their sales cycles, and have increased visibility into buyer intentions
Sales leaders can identify and replicate their top sellers’ behavior to scale success, decreasing the overall long-term cost of sales
Marketing can leverage our bottom of funnel insights and buyer insights helping marketing identify the content and experiences that engage buyers and drive revenue
Administrators can support content management and distribution of content as well as sales training efforts at scale from one unified platform, decreasing the administrative burden of launching and maintaining a Sales Enablement program

What are the components of sales enablement software?

The most important sales enablement software components include content management, content creation, customer engagement, presentation management, sales onboarding/training/coaching and sales communication. All of these components are critical to the optimal functioning of sales enablement software.

What are the benefits of enterprise sales enablement software?

Adoption of the right sales enablement software platform delivers many benefits. The first one is improvement in the orchestration of the sales process through technology. The second one is improved communication in marketing and sales through quality content. The third one is talent management through onboarding/coaching/evaluating employees. The fourth pillar is enhanced customer satisfaction, due to an optimized buyer’s journey. The fifth primary benefit of adopting an enterprise sales enablement platform is improved collaboration and process efficiencies.

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