“Sales and marketing alignment” is one of those buzzy phrases people often use without realizing they’re all talking about something slightly different. Sometimes it comes up when marketing is generating leads that sales complains are mostly unqualified. Other times, it comes up when account managers feel like they’re on an island and aren’t receiving the support they need from marketing.
It could also arise when you struggle to pull clear attribution out of your systems (“Where did that customer come from? How were we able to turn them into a customer?”) or when a high percentage of inquiries fail to generate larger order amounts on the back end.
The most important questions are: What does sales and marketing alignment mean for distributors? And how can better alignment lead to more growth?
Defining Sales and Marketing Alignment for Distributors: A Customer-First Approach
A previous DSG article about digital strategies notes that marketing provides what sellers “need to be effective in this cross-channel world — so that they can get the full picture of the customer, their needs, their behaviors and their businesses, and then effectively sell to those customers using digital means.” Therefore, sales and marketing alignment actually means approaching marketing as a sales support function to provide a full view of the customer to the sales team, thus enabling more sales.
This is the nuance that differentiates distribution marketing from other, more lead-generation-focused businesses. Good marketing for a distribution business is “customer marketing”; great marketing covers the full lifecycle, with a strong focus on sales enablement.
How to Align Marketing’s Functions to Sales: Practical Examples
Field Marketing
Field marketing uses on-the-ground, direct marketing to engage with customers, promote products and drive sales. When done well, it increases brand awareness, improves product visibility and builds relationships with customers. DSG’s Chief Strategy Officer Ian Heller offers a tactical tip for distributor field marketing: Whenever a team member sees a contractor truck around town, have them snap a photo of it and send it to a dedicated marketing phone.
This creates a boots-on-the-ground lead list of potential customers to target. Field marketing also includes event marketing: coordinating a booth at an upcoming tradeshow, creating handouts and collateral for the event, sending pre-event emails and calendar invites, event site lead capture and CRM syncing, and event follow-up email sequences.
Sales Enablement and Support
An effective marketing department is always available to internal sales team members. It should be easy for reps to get in touch, and there should always be someone available to field immediate requests. There should also be a centralized location to access organized collateral and documents. When a marketing department keeps product catalog information up to date, has frequent check-ins with the frontline team and regularly collects feedback from both reps and customers, it becomes a resource that sales teams can rely on.
Cross-Sells, Upsells and Reorder Enablement
One of marketing’s most crucial roles is to drive more and larger orders from customers. Coordinating product catalogs that feature product bundles, highlighting products typically purchased together, suggesting products that other customers have purchased and anticipating products that would solve for the next problem are all great ways to build a dynamic product catalog – all of which can be added to promotional efforts, newsletters, automated customer reminders and ongoing campaigns to address the customer’s needs.
Full Lifecycle Marketing
When marketing is responsible for the full lifecycle of a lead to a repeat customer, the department becomes more far-reaching, effective and aligned with the growth goals of the organization. Consider shifting to a “Marketing by Objectives” model instead of measuring by promotions. Similar to the OKR Methodology from Measure What Matters by John Doerr, “Marketing by Objectives” measures marketing’s effectiveness in terms of new customers added to the business and number of customers retained. It then measures each cohort by its average number of transactions, average order value (AOV) and gross margin percentage. If marketing is truly involved at every stage of the lifecycle of the customer, and if it’s improving onboarding, reducing friction and enabling sales, these business objectives will undoubtedly improve.
How to Start Aligning Distributor Marketing to Sales
Define the project, goals and timeline: The goal for distributors is to shift to Marketing by Objectives, but there may be additional goals unique to your business. Clearly define the goals for the project and identify your timeline for measuring results. (We recommend taking measurements at 30 days, 90 days, the next six months and one year to better visualize the business-wide changes created by improved alignment).
Take baseline measurements: Make sure you can access the relevant data in your systems, going back in time to the same increments by which you want to measure results. Comparing apples to apples is key to quantifying improvements. For the timeframes specified, know your Number of New Accounts, Number of Lost Customers, Number of Retained Customers and for each cohort, Number of Transactions, AOV and Gross Margin percentage.
Identify the root causes of misalignment: Why haven’t the teams been aligned up until now? What are the root causes? The most common cause of failure in large scale, organization-wide change projects is not addressing those root causes, which allows teams to creep back into the previous state. Maybe it was a lack of leadership buy-in (e.g., seeing marketing as only for promotions). Maybe it was siloed communication between departments. Maybe it was a combination of many things. Getting clear now will solve many headaches later.
Solve for the problems: Create the plan for obtaining the objectives, the campaigns and projects that will support the objectives and the plan for fixing the root causes of the issues.
Implement with a cross-functional team: Enact the plans concurrently and across all departments it will touch. Additionally, commit to a plan of reiteration: internal communication to team members as to what was done, why it was done and what is needed from everyone to stay on the same page.
Measure to manage: Make sure your teams know exactly when changes will be rolled out by keeping the date firmly recorded in systems, charts and measurements. Measure the results on the timeline you’ve determined, and compare them to the previous period to quantify how better alignment between sales and marketing has improved customer retention, gross margin, profits and overall business outcomes.
By taking a comprehensive approach to sales and marketing alignment, you’ll ensure that everyone is talking about the same thing — and that your results will be tangible, significant and repeatable.
Carly J. Cais (“case”) is a consultant who optimizes and enhances go-to-market teams for B2B companies. With deep experience in industries such as construction, manufacturing and distribution, she identifies opportunities for growing both inbound and outbound leads and improving internal Marketing and Sales collaboration. Her approach ensures full usage of the existing technology stack clients have already invested in, along with adding in technologies and methods that improve team performance and automate repetitive time-consuming tasks. This helps distributor Sales & Marketing teams reduce non-ROI administrative busywork, increase qualified lead flow and grow revenue. To learn more about Carly and how she helps spark more revenue for companies, visit RevvSpark.com. She can be reached directly at carly@revvspark.com.