Aligning Revenue Teams to Achieve Unified Success

The post-pandemic world has radically accelerated the transformation of businesses into digital spaces. With that acceleration, companies have found it increasingly difficult to gain and maintain buyer attention. In this new era, marked by rapid technological developments, sellers need to evolve their approach to match the needs of the modern sales landscape.

Strategically aligning revenue teams can become the foundation of creating selling strategies that anticipate adversity and stay on track to achieve business goals. By taking a holistic approach to the selling process and working collaboratively across revenue-facing departments, teams can make sure their efforts are suited to customer needs and tied with corporate initiatives.

Sales enablement professionals are uniquely positioned, as voices of influence for both sales and marketing, to assist in increasing collaboration and building selling strategies united around strategic goals and collective success for the company.

Below, learn how aligning revenue teams through enablement can help businesses achieve unified success.

The Value of Creating Alignment

The problem many sales reps are facing today is the complication of creating a lasting connection with their buyers. Today’s modern buyer has access to much more information than before, and the volume of that information can lead to choice paralysis, where the quantity of choices available for buyers creates the pressure of making the perfect choice. This results in more buyer speculation, longer selling cycles, and trouble sustaining interest.

Longer sales cycles aren’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is only when the payoff for this more expensive and time-consuming process is successful that they are worthwhile. When sellers themselves are receiving mixed messages from their sales leaders, marketing leaders, or other partners across the business, it can hurt their chances of emerging from these long cycles with a won deal.

Because of those areas of misalignment, reps end up giving buyers even more information that might be unrelated and ineffective, adding to the information noise they are already surrounded by. Ultimately, these moments of disconnect add up to lost revenue. When organizations are aligned on marketing and sales strategies, they are more equipped to increase productivity and drive revenue.

“When you as an organization take the initiative to strategically align sales and marketing, you create a moat around your organization that isn’t easy to replicate,” said Jeff Davis, founder of RevEngine.

When initiatives are aligned and consistent across the rep’s experiences with their revenue leaders, reps can be sure they are hitting the right objectives and working towards the same business plan as the rest of the revenue-facing teams. In addition to landing sales impact by using the most relevant and accurate information to sell to their customers, reps can gain confidence in knowing their efforts are clearly aligned with larger initiatives.

“Alignment is important for sales enablement, not only for effectiveness and impact, but also for visibility,” said Jessica Ryker, director of revenue enablement at Clio. “Oftentimes reps feel like they’re being pulled in a lot of directions, and there isn’t always a clear directive from the top-down and from each department.”

When reps work in an environment where leaders, goals, and business initiatives are aligned, they are better able to provide a cohesive experience to their customers by connecting relevant, impactful information to buyer needs.

Establishing a Foundation for Alignment

Creating alignment will only be impactful if it is practiced in areas all across the business. Sales enablement can help foster opportunities for alignment to take place and ensure that teams are collaborating productively. Below are five pillars where effective alignment can transform how the revenue engine operates and streamline team activities towards the same business goals.

• Culture: Work on becoming truly customer-centric. Rather than emphasizing it verbally, make it actionable by aligning the company’s goals and values to prioritize what is best for the customer over individual functions.
• Structure: Remove workplace silos and encourage cross-team collaboration. Team members will be able to align their work to the greater company goals, ensuring that your overarching business incentives are fueled by key actions that will lead to progress in the areas leadership cares most about.
• Process: During the sales cycle, reps need to stay aligned across the buyer’s journey to ensure a smooth experience throughout each stage. By connecting what salespeople are seeing in each stage of the selling process, marketing departments can adjust their approaches to ensure that messaging stays consistent and relevant to the buyer in every selling stage.

“Truly understand what you need to do in order to engage the modern buyer and orchestrate across teams,” said Davis. “It forces you as an organization to really think about what the buyer needs to get through each stage versus what we want them to do to progress through our sales process.”

• Communication: Prioritizing open and regular communication means having a feedback loop between revenue teams, not only in leadership capacities but with reps in the field so they can share insights back to the business.

“We need to keep communicating all the time,” said Maria Willait, senior sales enablement manager at ServiceNow. “The first thing that we do is weekly meetings, not only with marketing, but with sales management because the sales objectives are the same for all of us.”

• Tools: Curate the right revenue tech stack that empowers productivity and helps teams optimize performance with insights into what works. By using technology that encourages collaboration within a unified platform or provides data on buyer and seller activities alike, teams can land their initiatives impactfully and spend their time on the most productive activities.

By encouraging alignment across these pillars, revenue teams will be working as one to drive the business forward into greater growth and increased revenue.

As a team that is constantly working cross-functionally, sales enablement can play a huge role in establishing and maintaining alignment between revenue teams. With their proximity to all revenue-facing teams, enablement practitioners are able to create a common language between teams that ultimately results in better ways for the company to meet the needs of their buyers. As businesses learn to navigate this new selling landscape, uniting the efforts of revenue teams streamlines both selling and buying processes. And with continual feedback and open communication, they can refine their revenue engine to strengthen buyer connections and achieve consistent success.

“It’s not just one shot, it’s continuous learning,” said Willait. “Marketing supports sales and salespeople support marketing by being very close to each other and by counting on each other. Sales enablement is the glue between all these teams.”

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