Many business owners struggle with how to build marketing teams that collaborate with sales, and it shows. According to a survey by Gartner, marketing and sales teams only collaborate on three out of fifteen commercial activities. That means for 80% of activities concerning the sales funnel, these teams operate in silos.
Traditionally, these teams have their jobs demarcated precisely, with the marketing team handling lead generation while the sales team closes. However, the B2B climate has changed with the sales and marketing funnels merging into one consolidated buyer journey. Unfortunately, many businesses haven't bridged the gap between their teams.
For this reason, these businesses miss out on the 36% more business growth that companies with well-aligned marketing and sales teams enjoy. If your marketing and sales teams act like lone wolves, then you have a problem.
In this article, we'll explore how your sales and marketing teams can collaborate, the difference it makes, and a few tips for getting them to work together.
Best Areas Where Sales and Marketing Can Collaborate
Thought leaders and business analysts have coined the term ‘Smarketing’ to illustrate the importance of sales and marketing collaboration. However, we don't simply merge these departments into one because they still need some autonomy.
Where exactly should I have my marketing and sales working together? You ask. Well, there are some crucial areas where these departments should work seamlessly to ensure you get the best results. Let's take a look at them.
Messaging
Brand image is one of the most important assets of any business. It has to be kept consistent across all channels to build customer trust, gain new ones, and retain the old for downstream revenue.
Unfortunately, it is also one of the easier points to be damaged when your sales and marketing teams aren't aligned, and this is through inconsistent messaging. These discrepancies between your teams might seem like trivial matters that can be glossed over, but they stack up to dilute your brand image.
The story is different when these teams are well-aligned. Sales personnel gain first-hand knowledge of your customer's pain points and pass that along to your marketing team to help them craft better promotional materials. That way messages resonate better and increase lead generation and sales.
Lead Scoring
When you're starting up your business, your primary concern is generating enough leads. However, by the time you've found your feet and a lot of leads are coming in, you'll realize your sales and marketing teams can only stretch themselves so far.
This is where lead scoring and prioritization come in. With the marketing and sales teams working hand-in-hand, they can establish certain criteria in leads to determine how much effort they should allocate to closing them.
Leads with higher scores have better chances of ending in a sale, and as such should be pursued, instead of prospects with little likelihood of closing.
According to Hubspot, 54% of salespeople claim that selling got harder in 2023. If your team is going to work extra hard, they might as well focus on better prospects.
Sales Enablement Content
The best sales personnel are persuasive, silver-tongued geniuses who can convince prospective clients to discard the ‘prospective’ from their titles. They are good at what they do, but they'd be even better if you prepared them properly. This is where sales enablement and sales and marketing efforts come in.
Sales enablement is the process of providing your sales personnel with all the resources they need to close deals. This could include content, information, and tools to expedite the process.
Your marketing and sales teams should collaborate to create the most effective sales enablement content for your reps. Their efforts should be felt especially in some aspects like:
- Sales collateral: Sales collaterals of the average company usually contain information about the capabilities of their products from the marketing department. These answer the question, “What does it do?”
However, sales reps know that the average customer is more interested in the question, “What does it do for me?”
Collaboration, in this instance, would entail tweaking statements like “This product has a 2000mAh battery” to “This product will give you two days of non-stop usage.” - Case studies: Case studies from marketing departments are a great way to convince potential clients that you're the right fit for their situation. It's easy to fill them with technical details about the case. However, quotes and feedback from clients gotten by sales reps are necessary to make them feel more authentic and relatable.
- Competitive insights and analysis: Your business doesn't exist in a vacuum and smart marketing teams use this to their advantage. With competitive analysis and insights, you can place your business in a favorable light and emphasize areas where you outshine your competition.
With input from your sales team, you can refrain from focusing on areas your clients don't care about.
7 Tips to Foster Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing
Knowing that your business would benefit from sales and marketing collaboration is one thing; getting them to do it is another. With the right marketing strategies, however, you can bridge the gap and foster teamwork. Let’s explore a few ways to achieve this in your company.
1. Shared Goals and KPIs
Your sales and marketing teams are both aware that they're ultimately working towards one goal: Getting more clients for the company. However, when they hunker down to work on two different sets of goals and KPIs, it increases the divide between them and damages their alignment.
By creating clear and measurable KPIs, you can guide their efforts to be in sync to meet those specific objectives and get better results from your marketing campaigns.
Ensure to check in regularly to assess their progress and make adjustments based on the information you've gathered.
2. Communication is Key
“The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our customers.” — Jill Rowley.
Without proper communication between these two teams, the gulf between them will remain. You can tackle this by setting up regular meetings between your sales and marketing leaders for them to discuss and brainstorm together.
Technology helps in this regard. You can leverage collaboration tools like Slack, Trello, or Microsoft Teams to ensure that your sales and marketing teams, including marketing professionals, are in sync at all times, especially when managing marketing campaigns.
3. Joint Planning and Strategy
From the instances we gave earlier, it's obvious that your sales and marketing teams should collaborate when planning your sales or marketing campaigns. They should work together to align your messaging, so you can develop content that resonates with your target audience and supports your sales process.
This should also extend to your content creation and branding. Your sales team would know what steps would turn leads into paying customers quicker.
4. Co-creating Sales Enablement Tools
Sales enablement tools are great. However, they should incorporate advice from people with in-depth knowledge of the sales process. Sales leaders can collaborate on creating sales sheets, presentations, tables, and other collateral that aid product marketing.
You can also train your sales reps to use marketing materials effectively. Creating the best collateral won't matter if your sales team can't use them properly.
5. Leverage Technology
Beyond enhancing communication, technology also plays a big role in sales and marketing departments' alignment. You can implement a CRM tool to track leads and customer interactions, ensuring that your sales and marketing teams, along with marketing professionals, have all the data they need to tailor their efforts.
With data analytics software, your marketing and sales teams can identify trends to optimize campaigns and make informed decisions. Ensure that these tools are shared between the two teams, or they won't make much difference in enhancing collaboration.
6. Regular reviews and adjustments
One of the most important components of marketing and sales collaboration is ensuring that there is a feedback loop from Sales to Marketing. Marketing generates the leads and hands them off to Sales to close the deal, but the feedback loop is there to ensure that future leads are of higher quality and easier to close.
By embracing an Agile approach to marketing and sales, you can create a very flexible setup that recalibrates with each campaign to ensure that the next is better. This can only be done when the feedback loop is in place.
7. Build a Culture of Collaboration
Your workplace culture has to encourage collaboration if you want to get positive results. You can create this by encouraging joint team-building activities and ensuring that your leadership supports collaboration between the sales and marketing teams.
What better way can you show your employees that you value collaboration than by giving rewards for it? Make sure that your reward is meaningful and worth the effort, and watch as your workers get motivated to work together.
Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment
Thought leaders wouldn't go on about ‘smarketing’ if there weren't some benefits to be gotten from implementing it in your workplace. The effects of this change are widespread and positive, affecting almost all aspects of your business.
1. Increased Revenue
The biggest and most significant changes to your sales and marketing team alignment have the direct effect of increasing revenue. This is the endpoint of all your tweaks, but it occurs via different routes.
At the top of the funnel, you have enhanced lead generation by implementing a feedback loop between sales and marketing. This helps you identify and target high-quality leads, or potential customers, effectively.
You'll see improved sales conversion rates and quicker sales cycles, thanks to these higher-quality leads. These all lead to increased profits for your business.
2. Enhanced Customer Experience
Once sales officials are involved in the creation of promotional materials and branding, you can create a unified brand voice across all your customer touchpoints which would improve your customer perception.
With your feedback loop in place, you'll be able to deliver more tailored experiences to your customers. This would enhance their experience with your business and translate to a higher number of closed deals and sales.
3. Improved Operational Efficiency
Once your two teams have finally clicked, and information is shuttling back and forth between them, you'll notice a higher level of efficiency in your dealings.
A unified communications platform and knowledge base for the two teams would ensure that your sales reps spend less time searching for the information needed to do their jobs. This could take up to three hours of their time daily and you can simply cut it out by using shared resources.
4. Stronger Brand Image
With consistent brand messaging, you can strengthen your brand recognition and loyalty. That creates a stronger brand image for you.
Creating better customer experiences helps you turn satisfied customers into brand advocates. You can have them spread the word about your capabilities through testimonials and case studies, using your previous clients to get more.
What Types of Marketers are Best-equipped to Collaborate With Sales?
While your entire marketing team would benefit from closer association with the sales team, there are some specific marketers whose job description requires that they pay a lot more attention to the sales side of things. They include:
- Demand Generation Marketers: These professionals have a deep understanding of the sales funnel, and need data and analytics from the sales team to optimize their efforts.
- Account-based Marketing (ABM) Marketers: These marketers work closely with the sales team to pinpoint high-value accounts and tailor their marketing efforts accordingly.
- Content Marketers: These marketers create content that resonates with their target audience and drives engagement. However, it's quite difficult to craft compelling content for a target audience without in-depth information about that demographic from the sales team.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should the CMO be a Sales or Marketing Leader?
You should hire a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) with a background in marketing, and not in sales.
Although it is crucial to have a good understanding of sales, a CMO's primary duty lies in creating and implementing a marketing plan. That covers brand development, enhancing the buyers’ experience, and utilizing all available technology to make that happen. Unfortunately, you're unlikely to find these attributes in a person with a sales background.
How Can I Address Conflicts Between My Marketing and Sales Teams?
Two teams who have done their own thing for too long would butt heads when asked to collaborate. However, open communication is key. Encourage both teams to express their concerns and work together to find solutions. A neutral third party, like a manager or executive, can also help mediate these conflicts.
How can I measure the success of my marketing and sales collaboration?
You should keep track of key metrics like your revenue, customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, and sales pipeline velocity. Analyze this data to identify trends and determine whether this new setup is becoming beneficial yet.
Creating Your Marketing and Sales Dream Team
Marketing and sales collaboration is the key to any business development. Overcoming organizational silos, getting everyone on the same page, and encouraging cooperation will inevitably enhance such key aspects of business as profits and customer satisfaction.
If you start to follow these tips right now, you will develop a strong and effective marketing and sales team in no time. However, the search for people with these specific skills, who are willing and able to work in a team can be stressful, to say the least.
That’s where MarketerHire.com comes in. MarketerHire is the go-to site for businesses that are looking for experienced and qualified marketers and salespeople. We appreciate the need for teamwork and ensure that all our candidates meet the team-playing needs of the market. We're trusted by brands like Forbes, Netflix, and Unilever and have matched over 30,000 professionals successfully.
So, don't let the talent search prevent you from tapping into these benefits of marketing and sales alignment. Reach out to MarketHire and staff your marketing and sales teams with professionals who are team players and give their best.