It used to be that the marketing department lived in the world of branding and brochures, and the sales department operated in a silo with little to no contact with marketing. However, things have changed.

Prospects and customers with limitless access to information are more in control of the sale than ever before, and that increased level of buyer sophistication requires a tight alignment between the sales and marketing departments. According to a 2013 study by Marketo, when sales and marketing teams are in sync, companies increase closed deals by 67 percent.

Alignment can be an ambiguous term, but the bottom line is that if you have a sales process and you’re not ensuring that your marketing efforts are linked with that process, you’re letting valuable opportunities pass you by.

While every business is different, most follow a progression with comparable sales stages. Here’s how to get sales and marketing in sync at every stage of the sales process.

Stage 1: Pre-Sales Call   

The first question to answer is whom your sales team is targeting. It may sound obvious, but this crucial starting point is often overlooked. For instance, a sales team may be putting its efforts into targeting CFOs, because that’s where the real opportunities lie, while marketing is focused on lead generation to help salespeople meet accountants.

Once both teams agree on who their prospects are, you can begin to identify the target market’s specific wants and needs and how to acknowledge them through marketing. Marketing can research the drivers and challenges of the ideal customer and develop content that resonates with the right people.

Stage 2: Early Discussions 

A salesperson’s personal positioning can actually supersede the positioning of an organization in the eyes of a prospect, so the marketing team should place a heavy emphasis on how salespeople are perceived. When salespeople are positioned as strategic advisors, prospects see them as valuable resources contributing essential expertise.

The marketing team can assist with this positioning by writing blog posts for salespeople, helping them craft questions that will act as a catalyst for meaningful business dialogue and developing resources to support sales reps in this probing stage.

Stage 3: Building Value

It’s common for marketing to arm sales with plenty of product information that communicates to the buyer, “Here’s our product, and here are the reasons why it’s great!” But an effective marketing department that is in line with the buyer’s needs and the sales process will produce collateral that demonstrates how a product or service will solve a buyer’s challenges (and how it has solved similar challenges for similar buyers in the past). That type of information is enormously valuable for building credibility, not only because it’s meaningful to the prospect but also because it’s not simply a self-serving promotion.

Marketing should help sellers credentialize and build value with thought-provoking articles, case studies and success stories.

Stage 4: Closing the Deal

Sellers can justify price to prospects by thoroughly articulating value. Marketing can further assist with those efforts by designing uniquely bundled packages and crafting warranties and guarantees that are meaningful and present a lower risk to the buyer.

Case studies are a great way to strengthen confidence levels in the late stages of the sales process. If marketing has relationships with third-party regulatory bodies and research firms, they can lower prospects’ decision-making risk by validating the claims sales reps make about the solutions.

Finally, if a marketing department understands which stages of the sales process present a challenge or create a bottleneck, it can work with the sales department to expedite those stages. Maybe the solution to stalled deal signing, for example, is providing the option of electronic signatures or presenting a proposal in a cloud format, allowing for sharing within the purchasing committee (and the salesperson to see activity around the proposal).

Sharing a Common Language

Marketing plays a fundamental role in any organization’s sales effectiveness, so it only makes sense to expose that department to the sales process and consistently use it to drive sales efforts. But you can’t simply send marketers a training manual and expect real results. It’s important to be strategic and intentional in cultivating alignment, perhaps by doing some hands-on training with current marketing projects and making sure they are aligned to the sales process.

Marketing and sales want to work in tandem – after all, they’re after the same goal – but too often, a lack of communication holds them back. If both teams are well versed in the sales process, everyone can start speaking the same language efficiently and marching together in the same direction.