Marketing and sales alignment is all about creating a flawless customer journey that guides prospects through each stage of the marketing and sales funnel. It may sound simple enough, but this can be incredibly hard to pull off.  Getting it right requires a well planned approach for the top, middle and bottom of your funnel. As well as knowing how you’re going to transfer prospects from one stage to the next. Probably the most challenging of all, it requires sales and marketing to work closely together and be completely aligned.

Marketers often concentrate their efforts on new business, but sometimes, the fastest and most cost-effective way to expand your business is to look at your existing customers. In fact, the success rate of upselling or cross-selling to a current customer is around 50% higher than selling to a new one for the first time.

It is really important to thoroughly understand your markets, customers and general environment within which they are making decisions. Without this knowledge you certainly can’t set a solid marketing strategy that will target the right customer, improve sales and get your business the growth that it needs! 

A lot of people think that marketing is solely concerned with long-term growth. If you need short-term financial fixes, they say, you need to turn to sales. Marketing is not only a long-term growth strategy. And sales is not only a short-term financial fix. It is true that marketers do look at the bigger picture, but they can definitely also help businesses see an immediate positive change. A digital campaign, an emailer, a well thought out promotion - these are designed to have an impact on your sales pipeline in a matter of days or weeks.

  It takes guts to be an innovator. You’re disrupting an industry. And if you’re on the cutting-edge of technology in industries such as telecoms, fintech or insurance, you have a ring side seat to how the world is changing. But as exciting as change is, it’s vital to completely understand how the rest of the world is going to perceive your innovation. As the Harvard Business Review found, ‘to achieve any success when launching a disruption in the market, entrepreneurs need to put as much energy and investment into marketing new offerings as they do in generating them’. By Shannon Mackey, Regional Director  & Marketing Manager