Strategic alignment was born as a solution to an overwhelming trend I’ve seen across companies of all sizes and industries. Marketing and sales weren’t working together but were instead blaming each other for subpar performance.
To establish strategic alignment, you need to focus on four key areas: positioning, process, tools, and metrics.
POSITIONING
All team members need to be aligned on who the business was, is, and hopes to be. Positioning misalignment often stems from vagueness regarding a company’s vision and mission as well as poor documentation relating to problems, solutions, competitive advantages, and target market.
You need to have conversations internally about your brand identity. Your team needs to brainstorm, agree on, and document the company vision, mission, values, and aesthetic.
The next key area to look at is your target audience. Conduct an investigative study of who they are, where they are, and how they want to be pursued. These insights help define your “problem-solving” messaging and shape how to present your competitive advantages.
PROCESS
You need to have a tight process from the time a prospect first engages with you to the time they sign the dotted line.
There are a few pitfalls that we see in the majority of our clients as it relates to process. First, are data capture gaps, or missed opportunities to gain information from a prospect. Next, are unbalanced content pieces. Finally, there are follow-up blackholes.
In order to determine where your pitfalls are, I encourage you to mystery shop yourself. Invite trusted peers, friends, and family members to mystery shop your business and provide you feedback. Start by visiting your social media, website, brick and mortar store and make notes about how easy it is to progress to the next step.
TOOLS
What your tech stack consists of and how you use those tools is critical to your success in communicating your positioning and automating your process.
A customer relationship management tool, or CRM, will help you track your prospects’ activity, status, engagements, opportunities, and so much more. Another tool is one that supports marketing automation. Being able to automate emails, social posts, and more is critical to providing an optimized user experience. Lastly, Google Analytics and Search Console in Google Web Suite are key to managing activity at the visitor level of your funnel.
It is crucial to build a custom tech stack that is right for your business and your target audience. Research the tools that will help address the gaps identified in the process portion of your exploration and then select a tool that will work best for your team.
METRICS
The fourth and final area of marketing and sales that needs to be in sync is metrics. Document every number about your audience in the previous year that you can. Using these numbers, you can determine the conversion rates from one end of the funnel to the other. By documenting your current funnel, you will be able to look to the future and set actual milestones that you can achieve based on future revenue goals.
I recommend you set up a quarterly review to evaluate the data and make any changes necessary to your goals. Then once you are comfortable with the process, your evaluation cadence can change to every six months or annually based on what works best for your business.
To learn more about the four key areas and how to take the next steps to align your efforts, I invite you to access our on-demand webinar. Visit https://tools.deoredesign.com/fourareas to get instant access, taking the first step towards transforming your company’s strategy.