How Digital Transformation Can Help Businesses Align Their Marketing And Sales To Drive Growth?
It has been nearly a quarter-century since commercial use of the Internet and the World Wide Web began. During this time, the business landscape has changed at a frantic pace. Large multinational corporations such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, and Uber have emerged as key players in our modern economy. Digital marketing extends beyond internet marketing and includes channels such as mobile phones (both SMS and MMS), social media marketing, display advertising, search engine marketing, and many others. Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new or modify business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. It transcends traditional roles like sales, marketing, and customer service. Instead, the digital transformation begins and ends with how you think about, and engage with, customers. Digital transformation gives opportunities to use technology to drive efficiencies for both selling-side customer interactions and buying-side interactions with suppliers.
One of the most important factors in establishing a scalable, repeatable revenue machine is sales and marketing alignment. In aligned organizations, sales and marketing verticals function together in a coordinated effort to achieve the ultimate goal of revenue. Researchers have found that organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing enjoy 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates in comparison to those without sales and marketing alignment. Companies with adaptable sales and marketing processes tend to have an average of 10% more of their salespeople on quota. According to a study by Forrester, progressive companies with aligned processes achieved an average of 32% annual revenue growth while those without alignment reported an average 7% decline in revenue. They also achieved 24% faster growth and 27% faster profit growth over a three-year period. When sales and marketing align, revenue increases, the sales cycle shortens, and conversion rates improve along with forecast accuracy.
How digital transformation can help marketing and sales alignment?
Enhance collaboration and breakdown silos
Digital transformation initiatives are designed to improve operational efficiency across the entire company and/or create a customer-centric organization. As such, breaking down silos and ensuring that internal departments can collaborate seamlessly is the key to success. It’s important to involve all stakeholders across the organization so they can contribute to the initiatives. Digital transformation isn’t an isolated IT project. Instead, it often requires a fundamental transformation of the business structure and its culture. The marketing and sales department can benefit from their involvement in other areas such as customer experience, user experience, budget, web and app development, data analytics, and more. With greater collaboration among all departments, valuable insights can be shared vertically and horizontally, which means better decision-making and implementation.
Better customer insights
Data is the key to driving accurate business decisions. Using advanced technologies allows different departments to extract value and insights from various datasets. Employees can use the insights productively to drive growth. Digital transformation allows organizations to develop a deeper understanding of the target customers. By gathering better customer insights, companies can get a better picture of what they are interested in and how their product or service can remedy the problem and improve their lives. With this data, marketers can better nurture leads to convert into sales. Whether it’s through tracking the overall customer journey or just gathering information on what the audience is clicking on, digital transformation ensures that customer handoff between marketing and sales is a seamless transition.
Efficient content delivery
Content is one of the most excellent tools that marketers can use in the customer journey, allowing them to inform and educate the audience with information that is relevant to their brand experience. But it isn’t enough to create content anymore; marketers need to understand how timing and content go hand-in-hand. With digital transformation, marketers have a clearer picture of when the audience needs specific content in the customer journey. Blogs, brochures, email campaigns, and social media can be leveraged to provide customers and prospects with the information they need when they need it. Digital tools can be utilized to optimize the overall content marketing strategy, allowing the sales and marketing team to deliver the exact information that the customers need, at the right moment, through the right channel.
Ensure seamless integration of business systems
Most digital transformation initiatives aim to streamline operations, automate workflows, increase efficiency, and improve the customer experience. Marketing and sales alignment benefit directly from superior customer experience. Seamless integration of business systems allows streamline of workflow and managing different business functions flawlessly. The ability to sync data between two platforms eliminates manual information transfer, which in turn, increases efficiency and minimizes errors. With a better flow of information, data, and communication between the marketing and sales departments, it becomes easier to nurture leads through the sales funnel. It also ensures that no vital information about clients and customers falls through the gap, thereby strengthening the marketing and sales alignment.
Final Thoughts
Aligning sales and marketing helps companies deliver a better buyer experience and empower their representatives to be more efficient and productive. At Alkye, we help offer dynamic digital marketing and sales services to help clients to reach new customers and grow their business.
