Why sales and marketing need to work together

It’s a mistake we see all the time: sales and marketing sit in separate silos and don’t talk to each other. Sales often complain about the quality of the leads passed on from marketing, and marketing grumble that sales can’t close any of the dozens of leads they’ve generated. The best way to super charge your marketing and sales efforts: have the two teams work together! Here’s why it’s so important for these two business areas to collaborate:

Improved marketing and sales outcomes

The sales team is privy to fantastic insights about current customers and typical concerns and challenges that could improve marketing’s efforts. But if the two teams don’t talk, marketing will never find out that most customers are less concerned about price than customer service, for example.

Getting sales to pass on the inside scoop from the frontline can also help marketing generate more qualified leads. No one from an Instagram ad has ever converted into a customer? Move that budget to a different channel. The decision maker normally has at least 10 years’ professional experience? Marketing can stop targeting entry level employees.

Increased efficiency and productivity

When we’re not chasing our tails to find information that we’ve probably already received somewhere along the line, things get done faster. Think about how much time is wasted asking customers to enter their details or explain an issue they’ve just run through 5 times.    When the departmental barriers come down, we see a free-flow of information and ideas that allows better processes and speedier resolutions.

Getting your sales and marketing to work together

It’s all well and good to say our departments should be working together, but how do we actually make it happen?

Collaborate to create more valuable content

The purpose of creating marketing content is to help progress customers through the sales funnel. When you think about it, doesn’t it then make sense to utilise the sales team’s knowledge to help create that content?

As the people on the front line dealing with prospects every day, sales teams gain huge insight into what questions are asked and what friction is causing buyer hesitation.

This information is literally gold to marketing teams, who often rely on industry trends and market research to form their strategies. Set up a weekly meeting between sales and marketing, create a Slack channel or get sales to forward some notes or emails to marketing to help them get started.

Review your customer journey and develop an experience model

Creating a wealth of content means nothing unless it resonates with your customers. If both marketing and sales teams can come together to analyse the customer journey and identify the various stages their customer goes through, it becomes so much easier to reduce friction from both ends.

Customer journey mapping will also lead to a more cohesive brand experience. So, rather than just hoping and praying your strategy will return results, break it down and look at it from both a marketing and sales perspective.

Set shared KPIs

One of the biggest downfalls of traditional structures is disjointed goals. Marketers are often focused on brand awareness, engagement and leads. Sales, on the other hand, are more concerned about conversions and upsells.

These goals might be related, but they don’t always perfectly align with each other, causing discord amongst departments. To overcome this hurdle, try implementing some shared goals and KPIs that, as a group, everyone can work towards.

Develop a united front

Every employee is more than the department they work in; they are the brand representatives.

Regardless of role, every customer-facing person in your business should speak in the same tone, use the same terminology and form consistent methodologies that reflect who your business is as a brand.

The whole idea behind creating a cohesive brand is to allow customers to clearly identify an organisation through every touch point. When messages are inconsistent across departments, customers can’t form a clear picture of a brand.

The aim is to deliver a truly customer centric business that breaks down traditional barriers by building a unified, cross functional team.

Need help coordinator your sales and marketing efforts? Want to sort out your CRM or use insights from sales to turbocharge your marketing? We can help!