Companies relies on number of factors in achieving success, and one of the most important is marketing. However, many teams do not understand that to make marketing efforts more effective, they need to focus on improving marketing alignment. Marketing alignment is a term that refers to the way an overall marketing strategy aligns with a company's sales department, goals, and more.
In many companies, departments function well enough as independent units that management can forget how important it is for departments to function as a part of a greater whole. Increasing alignment among departments can increase a company's overall efficiency and it can streamline many processes. Two of the most important departments for alignment are sales and marketing.
If your sales and marketing teams are operating independently from one another, you are missing out on great opportunities for increased profits and overall growth. An estimated 88% of the highest performing companies have sales and marketing teams that are carefully aligned. If you're not familiar with marketing and sales alignment, you should begin today to learn about how this simple act of reorganization can have a monumental impact on your business.
Unfortunately, most company departments, particularly in marketing, do not function as well as they could. Inevitably, overlap occurs among teams, and this can decrease company efficiency.
There are many ways a business can address this. One effective way is to increase the marketing alignment among departments.
Marketing/Business Alignment Tool – This prescriptive tool provides benchmarks for marketing/business alignment. Maturity areas include: communication, competency-value measurement, governance, partnership, systems & technology, human resources.
One of the primary challenges that smaller businesses face today involves their marketing campaigns. Typically these challenges revolve around the lack of proper marketing alignment, meaning that companies do not coordinate their marketing messages with their target audiences. The reason improper marketing alignment occurs is because either the right message is delivered to the wrong audience, or the wrong message is delivered to the right audience.
