Operating your B2B in silos isn’t only outdated — it’s hurting your bottom line. Today’s customers demand the same great experience from B2B companies as they do consumer brands.
This requires serious alignment between your marketing and sales teams. Salespeople today are more connected to customers than ever before. This gives them excellent insights into the needs, challenges, and desires of your core audience. And marketing is now taking more responsibility for revenue.
Together, marketing and sales can build a marriage that focuses on delivering your audience’s needs at every touchpoint (while improving your revenue).
Let’s take a closer look at the importance of marketing and sales alignment and how Casted implements it successfully.
Why is Marketing and Sales Alignment Important?
The goal of marketing and sales teams is one and the same — to influence and attract buyers and convert them into loyal customers. But this is impossible to do when B2B companies allow their sales and marketing teams to operate independently.
Based on the numbers, it’s evident that aligning marketing and sales works:
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Aligned companies see up to 19% quicker revenue growth and 15% higher profits.
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56% of aligned companies reached their revenue goals, and 19% exceeded them. Compare this to misaligned companies — 37% reached revenue goals, and only 7% exceeded them.
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Alignment delivers an average of 36% higher customer retention and 38% more sales-win rates.
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81% of companies with somewhat or complete alignment said they beat their revenue goals.
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But how exactly do you align marketing and sales within a B2B company? Well, there are many ways you can pull this off.
Let’s take a look at an example.
How a Podcast Brought Together Marketing and Sales
B2B podcasts are all the rave right now. They’re a digital medium that connects experts with professionals looking for insights, news, and tips. So it makes sense for it to be used as a part of a demand generation strategy.
But that’s not how it started for Lev, a premier Salesforce consultancy for marketers. Their salespeople decided to start up a podcast as a passion project. And who better to head up the podcast?
The two salespeople had plenty of conversations with customers and understood their challenges, pain points, and needs. Plus, they had plenty of great customer-related stories to share on episodes. Although this was a great start, there was an opportunity to fine-tune the strategy to elevate the show and alleviate the workload for the hosts.
Holly Enneking, the VP of marketing, could’ve easily decided this should be a marketing initiative and taken it over. But instead, she decided to work in tandem with them by offering help with topics to maintain a more regular cadence.
The podcast team was thankful for the help, and the alignment proved to be beneficial on both ends. It gave both teams quality content that was relevant to the brand’s audience that could be used to nurture relationships and build trust — ultimately leading to a more cohesive and singular journey through the buying process.
Each episode is collateral that can be used for both sales and marketing outreach. Plus, it has it’s plenty of insights the marketing team can use to better understand their audience.
You can learn more about how this all worked out on The Casted Podcast.
How Does Casted Promote Marketing and Sales Alignment?
Casted also has a podcast that can be leveraged similarly. In fact, we’re always using our episodes as a conversational point to personalize interactions with leads and customers.
But we also use a unique approach to our marketing and sales alignment.
We decided to use the conversations we’re having on our podcast, both internally with our teams and externally with experts, to create a knowledge base of insights and customer testimonials within the Casted platform. After this content is created (full episodes, clips, audiograms), it’s tagged with relevant terms so those who need it can easily find it.
For example, testimonials are tagged so our salespeople can find and use them for their outreach. In fact, we just wrapped up the first half of season 5 and asked sales to use the testimonials, topics, and quotes that aligned to the conversations they are having with prospects.
It’s a win-win for marketing and sales because they have access to the information they need to make their efforts more effective. The benefit of alignment across a business is that it creates one cohesive journey and experience through our brand for our subscribers, prospects, and customers. Because as consumers ourselves, we trust brands more when the message and experience is the same across the board.
Using a B2B Podcast to Align Marketing and Sales
If there’s a theme here, it’s how having a B2B podcast can help align marketing and sales teams. There’s nothing like using customer-facing salespeople’s insights to create meaningful episodes — because we have that knowledge, we know that the content we’re creating will resonate with our audience.
But if your brand doesn’t already have a podcast, then the concept may feel a bit overwhelming. This is why using a B2B podcasting platform is a must.
This way, you can focus on creating great episodes without stressing over how you’ll upload, distribute, and amplify the promotion of each episode. At Casted, we offer all of this, plus reports to attribute your podcast to marketing and sales goals.
If you’d like to start creating engaging content, then allow us to help you make it happen. Contact us today!
