Ensuring all the departments in your organization are aligned is a key element when it comes to the success of any company, but marketing alignment is probably one of the most important. Why is that? Marketing is the only department that positions your organization in the market and creates content that speaks on behalf of your brand and value proposition. In this blog post, we are sharing reasons why it’s imperative for marketing to be aligned across the whole organization and not just with the sales team.

Sales Team

Alignment between sales and marketing teams is probably the most important of any department relationship and that is because their goals are often dependent on one another. Marketing’s responsibility is to build brand awareness and generate leads and sales’ responsibility is to follow up on those leads and close deals.

Marketing can help sales by generating leads and opportunities but how can sales help marketing? Since sales is customer facing and often Marketing is not, they can let marketing know what kinds of questions customers have during the sales process and if there are any roadblocks in the sales process. This will allow marketing to better qualify leads before passing them along to sales and it will also give them ideas on what kinds of content to create.   

Technical Team

Technology is constantly evolving, and the technical team is one team that constantly stays up to date on changes within the ecosystem, new solution features, and new solutions. Ensuring this information is communicated to marketing, which may not always be up to speed with these changes, gives them the chance to update existing content and collateral but it also gives them topic ideas for new content.

Technical teams can also help marketing craft content that is more technical focused. Whether it’s a blog post going into details about features or an interview style article that covers technical capabilities and integrations, working with the technical team can help to generate more technical focused content that marketing is not as knowledgeable about.

Operations Team

While Account Managers might maintain the relationship with customers and be the main point of contact, sharing customer experiences with marketing can often fall through the cracks. Working directly with operations can uncover customer success stories that can then be turned into case studies or testimonials. Operations can also shed some insight as to what questions customers might have once they are implementing a solution or service. This information could then be turned into both external marketing content or sales enablement content.

Human Resources Department

Did you know employee content is the highest performing content for company pages on LinkedIn? Sharing employee related content allows customers and followers the opportunity to see what it’s like behind the scenes at your organization and it humanizes your brand by putting a face to your company. Customers might have interacted with your employees through email or phone calls, but do they know what they look like or anything about them?

Human Resources can work with marketing to develop employee related content for social media or any other external facing channels like newsletters and the website. In addition to sharing employee related content, Human Resources can share employee certifications and business-related accomplishments with marketing. These statistics could then be positioned onto the website and into sales enablement tools like battlecards one pagers.

Executive Team

Since marketing creates content and builds lead generation campaigns, it’s imperative they are aligned with overall business initiatives that are often created through the executive team. If your company has a goal of growing cloud revenues by 40% in the next year, how will marketing support that? Ensuring the marketing initiatives are aligned to overall business goals will be imperative to reaching those goals.

Finance Department

If there are many marketing initiatives that will require capital investment, finance can help to prioritize those marketing initiatives based on the budget that is available. Understanding how much budget is available will also help marketing explore other ways to gain funding through Marketing Development Fund opportunities. Budgets can also change and usually marketing is one of the first places to get cut so it’s important to speak with finance on a regular basis to understand when funds may or may not be available.