As companies scale rapidly, they can become so focused on acquiring customers, developing new products and meeting growing investor demands that internal departments become siloed. Each team focuses on its own workflows, processes and internal goals; reporting structures change as new hires are made; meetings are tougher to schedule or, worse, too many meetings are scheduled and nothing gets accomplished.
Unfortunately, when departments are misaligned, it can affect many facets of your organization, and ultimately, alter your results. We often see these misalignments between sales and marketing teams manifest in the following ways:
– Marketing and Sales have different ideas of who the company’s customers are.
– The content Marketing produces for the top of the sales funnel doesn’t resonate with prospective customers as Sales engages them in conversations and attempts to move them further down.
– Sales doesn’t provide Marketing with enough feedback on what’s working and what’s not with prospective customers at all levels.
– Marketing’s paid media plan includes editorial targets that Sales knows prospects don’t read.
– Marketing produces too much owned content that can come off as overly self-serving to the company.
Sound familiar?
Some of these growing pains can be addressed simply by iterating on the feedback loops that already exist between the departments, but other such challenges at high-growth companies are seldomly solved so easily.
PR can be a great way to bridge the gap between Sales and Marketing. For all the new functions PR has assumed in recent years, including more marketing capabilities, a good old-fashioned media relations and thought leadership strategy can go a long way. Third party validation is still at the heart of PR’s function for many companies, Red Fan’s current roster included, but it’s only useful when it targets the right publications that reach the right audiences at the right time to incite action that is both measurable and reverberates through Sales in the form of leads and conversions.
A good PR firm will sit down with Marketing, identify the target personas they need to reach and cross-reference them with readerships of target publications and paid media recommendations, taking into account existing media trends, editorial themes, extra distribution at conferences and tradeshows and upcoming product announcements or initiatives.
