Industry Sales: Better Alignment leads to More Profit

One thing is abundantly clear for TEUN and our clients in the Manufacturing Industry: good coordination between marketing and sales leads to better results. But what have we learned from recent research on marketing and sales synchronization*? That the alignment between marketing and sales is lacking in 72% of companies in the Netherlands. This has a significant impact on the operating result.

Silo mentality

Silo mentality or island culture is of all times. Marketing and sales have traditionally always lived and operated separately, sometimes literally on different floors. Moreover, the gap has only become bigger due to remote working, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

A noteworthy result from the research study is that marketing generated 46% fewer leads and sales recorded a 58% drop in revenue. So inadequately aligning your marketing and sales greatly impacts the bottom line.

It is important that marketing and sales
work together from step one in the
sales process.

Industry sales: new business focus

We know from experience that in manufacturing companies where marketing and sales work closely together, profits grow on average by 20%. On top of that, sales close 9% bigger deals with prospects who have been ‘fed’ relevant content from marketing.

As we all know, marketing is a broad field with activities that focus on staff, customers, partners, suppliers, and their position in society. As an industrial marketing company, TEUN uses industrial marketing with one clear goal: to get in touch with potential customers.

That is why we place first priority on getting the marketing and sales departments of customers to work closely together.

Cooperation? How?

As a manufacturing company, you have clear growth ambitions with the ultimate goal of securing your future. Commerce plays a key role in achieving these growth ambitions. Marketing and sales are deployed to the commercial front lines of your business.

So how can they work better together?

Create focus

Good collaboration starts at the drawing board, where management, marketing, and sales create focus as one team. Focus is about making choices in the product range, market, and type of customers, and then determining the message to convey. This ensures that marketing and sales are on the same page from day one.

Set course

The next step is for marketing and sales to discuss the commercial objectives and the desired result for the long term. Goals and results, therefore, lead to concrete and jointly agreed follow-up steps, for instance, proper alignment of the sales process with the purchasing process for the ‘ideal customer.’ Using this strategy, both departments can report to each other monthly and share the facts, figures, and experiences.

“Marketing is not a trick. That's why TEUN deliberately seeks the connection with sales.”

Joost van Aaken, ARODO

Book results

The ability to act in agreement based on data is crucial for effective optimization. Ideally, marketing and sales work together in a central digital system (Sales CRM) that displays real-time data on leads and deals.

Having insight into this kind of data allows marketers to always optimize the marketing tools in a targeted way and ensure better results in the short as well as long term. In professional terms, this involves monitoring > analyzing > optimizing > repeating.

As such, it is and will continue to be crucial for marketing and sales to consistently discuss insights and results with each other.

Using one central system together, therefore, has enormous advantages, but that alone doesn't solve the silo mentality problem. As such, it is and will continue to be crucial for marketing and sales to consistently discuss insights and results with each other.

Conclusion

Practical and close cooperation between marketing and sales yields profit for your manufacturing company: in terms of turnover, future viability, and job satisfaction for your staff. Their efforts have a much more significant impact than you might think.

The cooperation between marketing and sales is shaped by creating focus (proposition), choosing concerted goals (strategy), and managing the execution efficiently (management). In short, by using industrial marketing for sales.

Curious about how better cooperation between marketing and sales can help your business grow? Please don't hesitate to get in touch with us. As a technical marketing agency, we can show you how that cooperation can be established.

* The State of Sales and Marketing Alignment in 2021 conducted by software company Freshworks