Written by Nathaly Camargo Palacios
We are an organization dedicated to connecting marketers with the cross-functional teams they collaborate with. The eMA helps you tackle the most pressing challenges businesses face today while sharing the best practices in digital and traditional marketing. Stay tuned for insights, trends, and strategies to keep you ahead in the evolving marketing landscape.
Our community brings together professionals at every stage of their careers, from recent graduates to C-suite executives. Through the eMarketing Foundation, our nonprofit, we collaborate with volunteers to support career growth and foster employment opportunities. By engaging in hands-on projects and networking events, volunteers can expand their expertise, connect with industry leaders, and take their careers to the next level.
How does the eMA Help Marketers?
At the eMA we are committed to creating meaningful connections across the marketing ecosystem. We reduce the gap between buyers and sellers, employees and employers, and service providers and agencies, helping them collaborate to break down silos and achieve company goals. Through dynamic podcasts, interactive roundtable discussions, insightful webinars, engaging live events, and curated programs, we bring together leaders, industry experts, visionaries, and solution providers across industries to help you connect with the target audience you are looking to reach.
Marketers are faced with challenges both inside the ecosystem and cross-functionally. The eMA brings thought leaders and subject matter experts together to provide the process and techniques to address these challenges directly and strategically to enhance a marketing team’s ability to not only meet but exceed their goals. By overcoming these obstacles, teams can streamline their processes, optimize performance, and unlock new opportunities, ultimately driving sustained sales, revenue, and growth for the company.
Each week we’ll focus on a particular challenge facing teams, along with conversations and examples of the process and tactics used by individuals and companies to turn around a situation or deliver positive results. As a community, we encourage you to comment or suggest recommendations on the topic. If there is a topic that you and your team are looking to overcome, or have resolved, we’d love to have you as a panelist or guest.
Our inaugural topic is the misalignment between marketing and sales teams.
Within many organizations, especially across B2B companies, the absence of clear communication, siloed data, and nebulous processes results in a scarce pipeline and missed revenue. The causes that contribute to these breakdowns are widespread and include:
- Different objectives between departments which leads to inconsistent messaging
- Use of different KPIs and success metrics
- Misaligned content strategy
- Sales teams feel marketing departments don’t know their customers’ needs and questions and target the wrong audience.
- Sales teams don’t research potential clients and don’t have consistent outreach schedules to follow up promptly.
- Leads are passed to sales without qualification causing a disjointed customer journey
Marketing and sales teams will most likely always have their challenges but there are effective solutions your organization can implement to address and overcome them. For example, our panelist from a virtual panel discussed the topic of alignment and unifying teams. Key talking points emphasized :
- The CEO’s role in enforcing good behavior and ensuring alignment throughout the organization.
- The importance of candid, consistent communication.
- Implementing regular collaborative meetings and strategic planning sessions of both departments
- How the use of cross-functional pods and a rule of three for goals and KPIs can be used to achieve team alignment.
- Why developing a unified customer journey map is key to measuring relevant KPIs and success metrics.
Another example of marketing and sales working together to align goals and drive growth is Veracode. Veracode is a tool that helps make software more secure by building security checks directly into the development process, so potential issues are fixed early, saving time and money. They implemented an integrated content campaign framework aligned to the buyer’s journey, this way they were able to increase measurable impact on pipeline and bookings. This approach included best practices in lead follow-up and nurturing, as well as closed-loop marketing and sales strategies. As a result, Veracode uncovered a $1 million opportunity, showcasing the significant benefits of aligning sales and marketing efforts.
Check Veracode’s Case Out Here!
Are your company’s marketing and sales teams in alignment? We’d love to hear from you and look forward to your comments and suggestions. See you next week where we’ll explore a new challenge and the solutions marketers are leveraging to overcome.
Thank you for reading. Welcome to the community.
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