The Best Software For Getting Marketing and Sales Alignment in 2024

The road to seamless marketing and sales alignment is often filled with obstacles…

Each one is capable of derailing a team’s success.

What if your marketing team generates leads that the sales team deems unqualified?

Or perhaps your sales team is focusing on the wrong prospects, leading to wasted efforts and missed revenue opportunities? 

Worse yet, miscommunication between departments could cause friction that hampers collaboration and stalls growth to an absolute standstill.

These are just a few challenges organizations face when marketing and sales teams are not in sync. This is why marketing and sales alignment has become increasingly important for B2B brands. 

Content teams need to be aligned with SDRs. 

SDRs need to be aligned with product marketing. 

Product marketing needs to be aligned with revenue. 

Revenue needs to be aligned with leadership and vision. 

Alignment is key. 

What are the most important qualities for maximizing sales and marketing alignment?

Based on research, the best sales and marketing teams are aligned through five key alignment efforts that can support your organization: 

1. Establishing a unified customer journey
2. Being aligned on unified KPI metrics
3. Creating a culture for shared information
4. Embracing cross-organizational feedback
5. Using performance evaluations to set the bar

Here’s a chart that showcases what this entails: 

This is where software tools designed to align marketing and sales efforts become indispensable. I’ve used more than 50 different sales and marketing tools over the last two years alone. This is inclusive of marketing and sales tools that I’ve demoed for my revenue team, tried for client initiatives, experimented with for affiliate purposes, or pursued as potential investments. 

Three things have become clear in this experience: 

1. Sales and marketing tools are plentiful
2. There’s a big difference between good and great
3. The best marketing tools support the sales engine

According to Marketing Profs, companies with aligned sales and marketing teams see 36% higher customer retention rates and achieve 38% higher sales win rates.

Marketing and sales alignment tools have become essential in breaking down silos, improving communication, and driving revenue. In this article, I’m going to share some of the best software solutions for aligning marketing and sales — tools that will not only foster collaboration but also enhance productivity and accelerate growth.

Let’s start by diving into why marketing and sales alignment is so critical.

What Is Sales and Marketing Alignment?

Sales and marketing alignment refers to the strategic process of ensuring that both the sales and marketing teams are seamlessly working together toward shared goals. This alignment is crucial for generating high-quality leads, nurturing prospects, and ultimately closing deals. When these two teams operate in harmony, they can more effectively target the right audience, streamline the buyer’s journey, and drive higher revenue.

But achieving this alignment goes beyond just coordinating efforts; it involves a deep integration of data, communication, and strategy between the two teams to ensure that every action taken by marketing supports the sales process and vice versa. 

What Tools Support Sales and Marketing Alignment?

The tools that support sales and marketing alignment are the ones that provide connection across the revenue function. To establish this alignment, revenue teams and growth organizations need more than just basic communication around deals and their pipeline.

Marketing and sales teams need tools that facilitate collaboration and transparency between them.  

Tools that arm them with data.

Tools that arm them with workflows.

Tools that arm them with effective comms. 

Tools that arm them with reports and analytics. 

You need to be able to see how marketing activities are driving the pipeline and how sales executives are turning that pipeline into deals that close and convert.

Key tools that support sales and marketing alignment include:

• Lead management tools: These help track and manage leads throughout their journey, ensuring that sales teams receive well-qualified prospects.
• Pipeline management tools: These provide visibility into the sales pipeline, allowing both teams to monitor progress and adjust strategies as needed.
• Activity tracking tools: These tools track the interactions and engagements between prospects and your teams, ensuring timely and relevant follow-ups.
• Performance management tools: These allow for the monitoring of KPIs across both teams, aligning their efforts with business goals.
• Content management tools: These ensure that sales teams have access to the right marketing content at the right time, assisting in nurturing and closing deals.

There are a ton of tools that fall into these categories. 

But rarely is there a tool that covers it all. 

This is where Koala comes in. 

Here’s a snapshot of how their signals work and the outcome of using their product: 

It starts by identifying high-intent signals from site visitors and then decides which route it should take that signal. If it’s an active opportunity / target account it can be routed to an AE via Slack or Hubspot which then leads to actions being made by the SDR. If there’s a few questions on whether or not it’s a perfect fit – the account can be passed to a BDR for manual research. If there’s multiple questions and uncertainty around fit – an automated outbound activity can take place or it can be ignored entirely. This is all powered by a strong content engine that leads to intent. 

Koala is an AI-powered tool that integrates directly with HubSpot, offering a seamless way to monitor and optimize your marketing and sales efforts. I’m a big fan of Koala for a few reasons, but the most important one is that it allows you to really turn content into a pipeline-generating, demand-capturing machine that drives results and revenue. I’m excited to share with you a bit about what that looks like in this piece and how we’re leveraging it at Foundation. 

Here’s a few simple reasons why Koala is my favorite SaaS on the market right now:

1. Track Account Activity on Your Website

Koala allows you to track the accounts visiting different pages on your website. 

The Account Page within Koala gives you a glimpse into the different companies that are visiting your site on a regular basis. You have the ability to identify “high intent” signals (meaning these people are ready to buy or showing signals that they’re ready to buy) assigned to accounts:

As the signals start to rise (visiting more pages, time on pricing pages, etc), the intent score behind the prospect and the account goes up, making it a stronger indication to your sales team that they should reach out and engage with this potential prospect.

Let’s get very tactical for a second:  

We have Koala installed on our site and I can use it to see that 10 different people from Shopify visited the Foundation site in the last few days. The dashboard shows me what content they were most interested in and that they had spent some time looking at our team page: 

This type of information allows for very tailored communication and insight. This level of insight is crucial for tailoring your marketing and sales strategies to meet the needs of your target audience.

But here’s where the alignment between marketing and sales happens.

It’s still in beta, but the Prospector tool from Koala helps you turn this account data into individual-specific data. You simply click on this button: 

And in a matter of seconds, Koala pulls data from all the people who work at Shopify that fit our target persona. 

It includes their names, LinkedIn profiles, roles, and even their email addresses: 

Let’s say, though, that I wanted to connect with people who might be responsible for thinking about content distribution. . . 

Koala has an AI Prospecting tool that allows you to ask specific questions and get relevant answers. 

For example, I told the AI I wanted “marketing leaders who care about content distribution,” and in seconds, it gave me the names of these individuals and their roles: 

But the best part?

It also gave the context and reasons for why these people matter. 

If you’re a sales rep, this type of data makes it easy for you to get a glimpse into how your content marketing team’s content is influencing buyer decisions. 

2. Automate and Streamline Outreach

With Koala, you can set up automation sequences that send emails to accounts visiting your site. 

This automation ensures timely and relevant communication with potential clients, helping to nurture leads and move them through the sales funnel more efficiently. 

You can set up “auto outbound” rules in Koala that allow you to have streamlined communication to visitors who are identified or even visitors who are simply matching your ICP criteria:   

One of the best parts about this style of outbound effort is how connected it is to inbound. Imagine someone circulating your team’s comparison page or one of the many other landing pages that every SaaS should have and then automatically receiving an outbound email about that specific use case and ICP interest. 

This can all happen within Koala. 

If you’re already using an automated sequence tool like Apollo, you can send the “prospect” into that sequence and have emails sent, LinkedIn connection requests sent, and more. 

3. Comprehensive Reporting

I’m a big fan of HubSpot. 

I’ve tried a lot of HubSpot alternatives over the years, but I’ve yet to find a CRM as powerful as HubSpot. When you combine Hubspot with Koala, it becomes an even more powerful tool. There are three actions you can take from Koala to manually write data to HubSpot’s CRM:

1. Import Companies
2. Import Contacts
3. Claim Account (rewrite the Company owner to be the current Koala user)

This is important because it helps ensure alignment between marketing data and sales data. You can use Koala to keep track of how your content is influencing pipeline. 

The “Content Reports” feature within Koala is an absolute gold mine. 

Here’s a snapshot of some of the data it provides you with: 

It shows you how many accounts were exposed to your content. 

It shows you the conversion rates by content asset. 

It shows the impact that certain pages have compared to others

And it shows you specific pipeline value that has been influenced thanks to its integration with HubSpot. 

Koala’s integration with HubSpot means you get comprehensive reporting on your marketing and sales activities. You can easily track the performance of your campaigns, understand which strategies are driving results, and make data-driven decisions to optimize your efforts.

4. AI-Powered Insights For Marketing Teams

Koala’s AI-powered insights are a game changer for marketing teams looking to optimize their alignment with sales. This feature isn’t just about offering surface-level data; it’s about delivering deep, actionable intelligence that can transform how teams operate.

With Koala, marketing and sales teams receive personalized insights around their pipeline and success based on real-time data, which helps identify the most effective strategies and tactics for outreach, nurturing, and deal management.

For instance, the AI can analyze past site behavior and interactions to suggest which accounts are surging and then send you a Slack notification to marketing and sales teams.

This level of insight empowers sales and marketing teams to tailor their efforts more precisely, ensuring that the content produced aligns perfectly with needs and that outreach happens at the moment it makes the biggest impact. 

By leveraging these AI-driven insights, marketing teams can ensure that their strategies are continuously refined and adapted to meet evolving market demands, making the entire sales process more efficient and effective.

Wrapping This Up

Achieving seamless alignment between marketing and sales is no small feat, but with the right tools and strategies in place, it’s entirely possible. 

The key is to foster a culture of collaboration backed by data-driven insights and continuous feedback loops. Tools like Koala are revolutionizing the way teams work together, providing the transparency, automation, and intelligence needed to break down silos and drive consistent growth.

As we move forward in an increasingly competitive market, the organizations that succeed will be those that prioritize alignment at every level — from the customer journey to KPI metrics and beyond. By embracing the power of AI and leveraging tools that enhance collaboration, companies can ensure their marketing and sales teams are not just aligned but are working as a unified force to achieve common goals. 

The result?

Improved efficiency, higher win rates, and, ultimately, a stronger bottom line.