Six Steps to Align and Transform Your Sales & Marketing Capabilities

How much revenue are you losing because your sales and marketing teams are not aligned?

Business leaders today are under tremendous pressure to deliver above market growth in saturated markets and a weak global economy. So how are they expected to deliver these results? The answer lies in superior commercial sales and marketing capabilities. Hiring high performing sales and marketing talent is one critical component but the organization also needs to change.

Like the lean operations transformation that occurred in the 1980s, most organizations fail at transforming because they are ill-prepared, overly tentative and unwilling to adopt new behaviours completely. This is why significant change requires leadership and commitment.

To achieve commercial transformation, the process requires upgrading sales, marketing, pricing and customer experience capabilities to drive sustainable revenue and margin increases.

An organization’s competitive advantage is often short lived because they fail to progress beyond a certain level and some rest on their laurels. Businesses need an agile organization that is constantly innovating and evolving with the customer’s behaviours.

#1 Define the problem and current state based on data insights – by creating clear vision, goals and timelines creates an enormous amount of energy within the organization to get company-wide buy in and launch the transformation. With sales and marketing at the heart of the transformation, there should be a strong cross-functional adoption of a customer centric mindset across the organization.

#2 Build strong leadership and change management capabilities – change has to happen throughout the organization with shifting mindsets. Creating a team of change leaders to reinforce the message to the troops is a great way of including different levels of the workforce as they are trusted colleagues.

#3 Create a resilient transformation team – building trust is crucial in any team and it is through having a healthy team environment that performance will exceed above expectations.

#4 Build a customer centric workforce that fuels the commercial engine to adopt new strategic and pragmatic approaches to targeting, acquiring and retaining customers and developing product and brand value propositions.

#5 Role model new behaviours – coaching allows for constructive feedback and helping individuals work through issues to break old habits. If they feel safe to share their concerns and there is a strong coach to guide them, they will feel empowered to break free of any inhibitions that are holding them back from achieving success.

#6 Implement metrics to track and adjust performance – by using a common platform and dashboard, you will know what is working and what needs to be revisited or improved. Dashboards can measure financial performance, behavioral changes, learning and implementation success ratios. The measurements need to be introduced at the beginning of the transition program to create a baseline. Over the course of the transition, it is easy to assess what progress has been made at organizational and capability levels.

Creating a high-performance culture into the company’s DNA addresses that fact that change is constant.

Give your organization a competitive advantage by aligning your sales and marketing teams to improve business performance because both are accountable for a common goal – revenue.

When sales and marketing teams align, there is a significant increase in revenue and conversion rates as the sales leads are better nurtured and the sales cycle shortens.

Declining revenue, growth or margins? Now is the time to hire the right sales and marketing capabilities to drive your business forward.

Contact us or call +971 552 167 567 if you want to take a more strategic approach to hiring your sales and marketing teams to achieve scalable and repeatable revenue.