All too often, sales and marketing departments stand at odds. In reality, they’d both actually be better off collaborating to achieve departmental and company goals. Breaking down barriers between sales and marketing can have immense benefits for your organization. If you’re noticing disconnect or unhealthy competition between the two departments, read on for effective strategies you can use to bring sales and marketing into alignment.
1. Define the Interdepartmental Connection and Common Ground
Functionally, the goal of both marketing and sales is to drive revenue by connecting with the company’s target audience. While both departments execute that goal in different ways, there are natural points of connection and overlap between their approaches. For example, your sales team likely benefits from the lead generation that marketing campaigns drive. They also probably rely on some form of content marketing or material to move prospects through the buyer’s journey. On the flip side, marketing teams need case studies or customer success stories from sales to build out resources and run campaigns that capture more market awareness.
If your marketing and sales team find themselves at cross purposes, chances arethey don’t realize how they share similar goals and can be mutually beneficial to one another.. Clarify the connection, overlap and common ground (like the customer) between the marketing and sales teams and define expectations around how the teams should leverage one another to promote business success.
2. Open the Lines of Communication
Typically, sales and marketing experience strain for two reasons: either a cultural or economic cause, or both. Tension stemming from misunderstandings is often a result of a lack of opportunity for connection.
Do your sales and marketing team have a shared communication channel where they can collaborate, or do they have to make individual appointments and schedule meetings to get together? Do they know who the members of the other team are? Do they understand individual roles within the other department? Is there insight into one another’s departmental goals? Find ways to open the lines of communication between sales and marketing and encourage regular meetings and collaboration in key areas..
3. Change the Teams’ Office Locations
Does your sales team have its own section in the office, far away from the marketing department? Is marketing in an area where the sales team has to request access to get in? Consider changing the location of your departments so that they are in closer proximity to promote intermingling more frequently.If switching around your office floor isn’t an option, look for opportunities to bring sales and marketing together physically, such as a shared meeting room or conference space. If one or both teams are in a remote environment, create a shared virtual space to connect—like a chat room or Slack channel.
3. Share Collected Data With One Another
Your marketing and sales teams collect and use a great deal of the same data, but they may have very different views of it. Often, your sales team will have a more personal, direct connection with customers in the final stages of deciding to make a purchase. The marketing team, on the other hand, may have deeper insights into what brings customers into the sales funnel or wider industry trends. Share those insights and swap information! Both teams can provide nuanced understanding to similar data sets on the customer journey that can help refine strategy and promote revenue growth.
4. Have Sales and Marketing Shadow Colleagues
In order to create better alignment between sales and marketing teams, have them take a look at what the other team is doing. That can mean allowing members of the marketing team to participate in sales calls or head out to the sales floor to interact with customers directly. At other times, it may mean having the sales team sit in on a marketing campaign brainstorm or strategy session to understand how the process works and what elements contribute to production. In many cases, simply experiencing things first hand offers the perspective needed to bring the two teams into better overall alignment.
5. Go By the Numbers
Sales and marketing often have two different perspectives on key issues. Finances are always a central area of focus, especially when the company has a limited budget. However, allocation of other resources or what the company chooses to focus on when marketing a specific product can create points of contention. To unify sales and marketing around creating impact, have them look at metrics or data points like acquisition, retention and conversion. Then compare that against spend where you are able to. Keeping interdepartmental conversations rooted in objective truths like numerical data and using it to create go-forward plans to improve the numbers can help with alignment and motivation.
Alignment between your sales and marketing team is essential to your overall business success. When the sales and marketing team are in alignment, you can more effectively allocate your resources, identify the issues you face, and connect with your target market. With these key strategies, you can help create that essential alignment and improve communication between the two teams.
