The Four Keys to Building an Effective Growth Machine

If you find yourself asking any of the questions above, then your marketing and sales teams are misaligned, which will have severe consequences that ripple throughout your organization and reflect directly on the bottom line.

Fortunately, there’s plenty that leaders can do to bridge the gap between sales and marketing departments. Start by ensuring alignment in four key areas:

1. Communication and training

Communication – of lack thereof – is where the bulk of the breakdowns between marketing and sales teams stem. Bridging the communication gap between departments is undoubtedly the number one thing team leaders can do to ensure alignment across divisions.

Thankfully, creating steady feedback loops that foster communication and learning between teams doesn’t have to be complicated. Consider the following:

• What is the sales team hearing from prospects that marketing will benefit from knowing?
• What competitive trends is marketing seeing that sales can incorporate into conversations?
• What features or services are prospects most interested in?
• What language do prospects use in conversations? Can we match it in marketing materials?

Great communication means backing up one another and working toward a mutual understanding of the market. Of course, teams will need proper training on practices to improve communication, collaboration, and transparency. But when that happens, everyone wins.

2. Growth operations

I just went through a helpful exercise with Intention.ly’s new head of sales consulting, and my long-time friend and partner, Kyle Hiatt – who served more than 23 years driving Orion’s sales and business development. Together, we reflected on the challenges of creating a sales model that fosters sustainable growth, and we identified best practices and constructs based on core tenets of a successful sales process.

We agreed these tenets include the following:

• Service-level agreements (SLAs) to lay the foundation for expectations on each side of the coin: what marketing will do and when, what sales will do and when, and how they will work together in synchronization.

• Clarifying lifecycle stage terminology to mutually define what makes a lead “qualified.” This exercise will save both teams a lot of unnecessary frustration down the line.

• Competitive landscape knowledge sharing to fill in gaps and identify opportunities for growth. After all, both teams are uniquely positioned to keep an ear to the ground and communicate back what they learned.

3. Goal setting and measurement

While each team will inevitably own unique key performance indicators, agreeing on success metrics and how best to track them helps management and executive teams measure the success of the two teams’ working processes.

One of the ways I’ve helped clients achieve sales-marketing alignment is through hosting regular accountability meetings that foster transparent communication between all team players. These meetings are an opportunity for marketing to present campaign results to the client, and for sales teams to bring ideas to the table. Not only does this build great working relationships, it establishes trust and respect between the two teams.

4. Technology

Technology is not just a nice to have – it’s a need to have to optimize effective sales and marketing workflows.

When I work to help clients establish processes and implement software for the first time, I want to first understand the processes already in place today and what can be optimized to ensure smoother communication and more seamless operations.

Some of the questions I ask are:

• How does marketing get leads to sales for follow up?

• What background about a lead does marketing provide to sales?

• What systems is your marketing team using? What systems is your sales team using? Do they integrate?

• How quickly does the sales team reach out to leads? How often do they follow up?

• What happens after initial outreach?

• What are the main reasons a lead would regress back to marketing?

Technology can be an effective tool to bridge the gap between sales and marketing and ultimately help foster more effective communication.

Build your growth machine

With dedicated energy , marketing can be your biggest growth engine, but only if sales is plugged in to work hand-in-hand toward a common goal.

Aligning these four core areas is a lot of work – but well worth it. I challenge you to get intentional about the way you bring your marketing and sales teams together in 2024 to create sustainable growth for your firm.

For almost 20 years, Intention.ly co-founder Kelly Waltrich has been championing the role of marketing in the financial services industry. As former Chief Marketing Officer at eMoney Advisor and Orion Advisor Solutions, she proved time and again that there is no better driver of an organization’s growth and overall success than a well-run marketing and communications team. At eMoney and Orion, Waltrich built powerhouse marketing teams from the ground up, developing the engines that would fuel the highest periods of growth for both companies. Intention.ly is the culmination of every lesson Waltrich has learned thus far in her tenure as a marketing disruptor, born from her passion and persistent belief that when it’s done right, marketing is the accelerant financial services firms need to transform their growth trajectory. Schedule a meeting with Kelly here.

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