Did you know that strong product development and marketing alignment can boost revenue by more than 200%? Despite this, only 8% of companies achieve “strong alignment.” For the other 92%, this misalignment often feels like bleeding money on marketing without getting the sign-ups you expect. If that sounds familiar, this guide is for you.
It’ll tell you what problems you can fix and the benefits you can expect by aligning product & marketing departments. You’ll also find out what product-marketing alignment means, the prerequisites you’ll need to align your teams, and a step-by-step guide on how to achieve it. Let’s get started.
Aligning Product Development and Marketing: Table of Contents
- Product Development Marketing Alignment: What Does it Mean?
- Benefits of Aligning Product Development and Marketing
- Aligning Product Development and Marketing: What Do You Need?
- Product Development Marketing Alignment: Step-by-Step Guide
- Start Aligning Your Product Development and Marketing with Lean Summits!
- Product Development Marketing Alignment: FAQs
Product Development Marketing Alignment: What Does it Mean?
Aligning product development and marketing means closely coordinating the efforts and operations of your technical and sales-oriented teams. It’s one of the pillars of successful growth marketing and involves creating a structure of working & reporting that includes four major departments:
- Product Development
- Marketing
- Sales
- Customer Success
Its goal is to bring about continuous improvement through product upgrades based on feedback from existing customers. You can then use this feedback to market the improved product to close-fit prospects.
Benefits of Aligning Product Development and Marketing
There are four major benefits you can expect from aligning product development and marketing:
- Customer-Centric Products: The process of development/marketing alignment is based primarily on collecting and understanding customer preferences + requirements. As a result, you’ll be able to create highly customer-centric products and rapidly improve client experience by fixing errors or introducing upgrades.
- Reduced Churn Rate: A Gartner report found that approximately 12% of enterprise churn rates can be attributed solely to low consumer confidence in product roadmaps. Basically, if customers don’t see your product growing, they’re likely to make a switch. So, the first quantitative benefit you can expect from aligning product dev and marketing is a reduction in at least 12% of your churn rate!
- Better Interdepartmental Coordination: One of the biggest problems enterprises face is that marketing forwards unqualified leads to sales, which therefore can’t convert prospects into clients. Product and marketing alignment solves this problem because they’re required to set up shared goals, share their progress, and go after nurtured leads.
- Faster Growth & Increased Revenue: The most important benefit you can expect from integrating customer feedback into product development and marketing is faster growth. That’s because your products will be tailored to solving specific pain points, whereas the marketing team will find it easier to create compelling pitches and anticipate buying objections.
Aligning Product Development and Marketing: What Do You Need?
To align your product development and marketing efforts, you’ll need three prerequisites.
1. Key Performance Indicators
The very first thing you need to do is specify two sets of key performance indicators. The first set has to do with your revenue, marketing spend, and speed of product development. This means you need to measure sales, marketing ROI, and time-to-market for products. It’ll help you measure the impact of your product development and marketing alignment.
The second set of indicators has to do with the process itself – these KPIs might also be qualitative. To measure this, you should create product-specific feedback loops (how many people per loop vs. revenue increase or decrease for that product). You should also track the no. of meetings your cross-functional teams are having per week and if that’s aligning with higher conversion rates.
2. Integrated Product, Revenue, and CRM Tech Stack
Next, you’ll need a completely integrated go-to-market tech stack. This includes:
- A revenue orchestration platform like Salesloft.
- CRM tools like Salesforce or HubSpot.
- Product development software like Miro, Jira, QA Wolf, and Autodesk.
These tools will help you create a unified environment where product, marketing, sales and Cx personnel will be able to communicate with each other. It’ll also help them present evidence for their claims (“X feature needs to be fixed because N number of customers complained about it this week alone”).
3. A Diverse Organizational Reporting Structure
Lastly, you’ll have to create a slightly unconventional reporting structure. That means SDRs might have to report to both product and sales executives. Similarly, product developers might have to work with Cx professionals and revenue personnel to identify and fix bottlenecks. In other words, your organizational and reporting structures will have to be cross-functional – they should be defined by purpose and function rather than by pre-defined hierarchies.
Product Development Marketing Alignment: Step-by-Step Guide
Once you’ve got the pre-requisites locked down, here’s one approach you can follow to align your product development and marketing teams:
Step 1: Measure Past Success
First, find out where your product and marketing efforts stand. This means understanding which products, features, and customer segments are generating the most amount of revenue for your enterprise. It also means the opposite: identifying bottlenecks, drop-off points, and pain points of current customers.
Step 2: Analyze Customer Feedback
Next, you should undertake both a qualitative and quantitative analysis of your existing products and services. To do this, you can launch a survey with incentives for the participants. It should ask them to review the product quantitatively, specify their favorite features, voice their complaints/criticisms, and give suggestions on what they want to see from you. You might also want to undertake a keyword analysis of the reviews to understand the clients’ perception of your product/service.
Step 3: Integrate Feedback into Product Development
Once you know where you stand, it’s time to use the learnings to improve your product/service. We recommend creating a list of priorities for two things: the best features that you might want to improve on and the red flags you need to fix immediately. You can then run an evaluation of which is likely to gain you the most traction with existing and new customers. Based on this, your product team can structure the development timeline.
Step 4: Set Up Agile Marketing Strategies During Product Development
Simultaneously, you should also set up agile marketing strategies for your sales and marketing teams. Simply put, they should start executing campaigns that either highlight the improvements you’re planning to introduce or reach out to existing customers to keep them informed about product updates that are in the pipeline. One good way to do this is to hold a weekly webinar to share updates with clients and take their feedback while product development is underway.
Step 5: Launch Your Product and Plan After-Sales Support
Lastly, it’s time to launch the new and improved version of your product. If you’ve followed the first four steps closely, this process will be extremely smooth – you’ve already nurtured existing and prospective clients by integrating their feedback into the product development process. This means you’ve basically created a product for an already existing, in-market segment of buyers!
Start Aligning Your Product Development and Marketing with Lean Summits!
When your product development and marketing teams are in complete alignment, you’re very likely to experience unprecedented revenue growth. However, you might find it difficult to establish the initial infrastructure that can foster your enterprise’s marketing-development alignment.
That’s where we at Lean Summits Solutions come in! We’ve had a lot of success helping a diverse range of clients align their product, marketing, sales, and Cx departments. From e-commerce market leaders to shipping giants, we’ve helped enterprises create unified operations with cutting-edge technologies and marketing methods. So, if you want to bring about strong product development, marketing, and sales alignment in your organization, reach out to us today, and we’ll help you capture the summit of your industry!
Product Development Marketing Alignment: FAQs
1. What is product development and marketing alignment?
Product development and marketing alignment refers to the close coordination between product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams to use customer feedback for continuous product improvement and targeted marketing, driving growth.
2. What’s the biggest benefit of this alignment?
Companies with strong alignment achieve up to 208% higher marketing revenue and experience 19% faster growth by creating products and messages that resonate deeply with the market.
3. What tools are needed for alignment?
An integrated tech stack is crucial, including a CRM (like HubSpot), product development software (like Jira), and revenue platforms to enable seamless communication and data sharing across teams.
4. How does alignment reduce customer churn?
By acting on customer feedback to improve your product and roadmap, you build confidence. This directly addresses the 12% of churn attributed to low confidence in a product’s future.
5. What is an agile marketing strategy in this context?
It means marketing campaigns run concurrently with development, nurturing leads by highlighting upcoming features and gathering feedback during the build process, not just at launch.
