How Sales & Marketing Can Work Together to Maximize Growth (Updated Sep 2021)

Sales and Marketing are both working towards the same goal: securing business and helping their company grow.

But how they do this differs significantly.

Sales is a direct process in which the salesperson talks to the customer and steers them towards making a purchase. This might be in person, over the phone, or using a digital communication medium like email or even social media. The process might be very long, taking place over multiple conversations in which the salesperson learns about the customer and their pain points, and helps them understand how the product on offer can help solve them.

It could also be a very short process consisting of a single conversation in which the salesperson lays out the terms of the deal and processes the sale.

The sales game has changed somewhat in recent years, but it’s also stayed fundamentally the same in a lot of ways:

• Face-to-face, or field sales, still account for 54.5% of the sales force
• At large organizations, this increases to 71.2%

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The selling part may be relatively unchanged – although it is starting to evolve – but the buying part of the equation has gone through a transformation in the past decade or so.

Marketing is a much more holistic process that is designed to increase awareness of a brand or product to the target consumer as a whole. Rarely will a marketer deal one-on-one with a customer.

The methods, tactics, and channels used by the marketing department look very little like they did even 15 years ago. It’s primarily digital, including (but not limited to):

• Content marketing
• Social media marketing (SMM)
• Email marketing
• Organic traffic and search engine optimization (SEO)
• PPC ads

1. Influencer marketing

By 2023, digital ad spend in the US is expected to exceed $201 billion – almost double the level recorded in 2018.

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Regardless of how, marketing will often generate “leads” that Sales will pursue and try to convert. Unfortunately, that’s often where the relationship between the two departments ends unless there is a decent CRM.

Consider this:

• 25% of businesses describe their sales and marketing as either “misaligned” or “rarely aligned”
• Just 46% of marketers describe Sales and Marketing as “highly aligned” at their company
• 55% of marketers don’t know which assets their Sales colleagues are most likely to use
• Three in five marketers believe they understand what Sales requires from them, but only one in three salespeople agree
• Only 26% of respondents in a recent Hubspot survey have a formal service level agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing

And that’s a big shame.

Another survey found that the six biggest obstacles to sales and marketing alignment were:

• Lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects (43%) 
• Communication (43%)
• Use of different metrics (41%)
• Broken/flawed processes (37%)
• Lack of accountability on both sides (25%)
• Reporting challenges (21%)

Fix those, and you’ve spent the bulk of your dollar. The modern Sales and Marketing funnel demands better collaboration and communication between the two. 

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What Happens When Sales & Marketing Work Together

Marketing and Sales are both really important in their own right. No one – myself included – is going to argue with that. That said, they are far, far more powerful when united.

“There is no question that, when Sales and Marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.” July-August 2006 Harvard Business Review

Proper alignment between sales and marketing could lead to a staggering 208% jump in marketing revenue, as well as 38% higher win rates and 36% better customer retention. 

The nature of sales means that salespeople are able to gain first-hand knowledge of customers and their sales objections – much of which would be difficult, if not impossible, to gain any other way.

Marketing is likely to have hard data that shows what sort of information, content, or language customers and potential customers respond to.

Unfortunately, too many companies let Marketing and Sales operate as entirely separate entities. This is a huge oversight and missed opportunity, because together, they are so much more than the sum of their parts. They complement each other in a way nothing else can.

”Companies with dynamic, adaptable sales and marketing processes report an average 10% more of their salespeople meet their quotas compared to other companies.” – CSO Insights

The Three Levels of Sales & Marketing Alignment

Sales and Marketing alignment won’t just fall into place overnight. There are three levels you have to crack first before those two functions start working truly effectively together:

1. The Emotional Level: Your Sales and Marketing teams should be tight and have each other’s backs. They shouldn’t be fighting or pointing fingers. You’re trying to build a “best friends” relationship, not a “brother-sister” relationship.
2. The Process Level: There need to be clear, repeatable processes in place to ensure that everyone within both teams is pulling in the same direction and working in the same way. 
3. The Feedback Loop Level: Marketing doesn’t always produce great leads; they might not always get the messaging spot on. They’re only human, they can mess up. So can sales. So it’s important that a feedback loop exists between the two teams. Maybe the salesperson says, “You got really awesome customers from here. How do we get more of those?”  Or vice versa, “These customers really, really suck, can you please not bring any more of those in?” Both are very important.

How to Get Them Working Together

It’s all well and good to state the benefits of getting your sales and marketing teams to collaborate, but you also need to know how to get them to work together effectively.

First things first: you need to inform them of your project plan. 

The Initial Meeting

The initial face-to-face meeting is key. Your staff needs to understand what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.

That said, it’s important to keep the meeting casual.

You don’t want to scare your staff with these changes and you don’t want them to think it’s going to result in more work. Instead, focus on how collaboration will make everyone more effective at their jobs. You want all attendees to leave the meeting feeling positive about what’s happening and excited about the opportunities these changes will offer both the company and their own careers. It’s important to leverage a meeting assistant for sales teams to give them the best possible chance at success.

Explain what you’re trying to achieve, why, and the processes you’re going to implement to aid this collaboration. Answer questions. Set them at ease. It’s a big change, but one where the benefits far outweigh any downside.

In addition to this, there are three topics I strongly suggest covering in this initial meeting:

• Friction points in the sales funnel
• The ideal lead

1. Customer personas

Let’s talk about each of these in more detail.

Identify Friction Points in the Sales Funnel

Your sales funnel is the process your customers pass through before, and often after, they make a purchase.

There is no “official” sales funnel – at its most basic, it might look something like this:

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But every company, and the process its customers go through, is different. Consequently, so is each sales funnel.

Chances are, both your sales and marketing teams will be aware of the funnel your customers follow (even if they don’t necessarily call it a “funnel”) – but do they accurately understand what it is?

Make this a discussion point for your initial collaboration meeting.

What to do

Ask both teams to describe the sales funnel. If anyone’s unfamiliar with the term, ask them to describe the sales process.

See how the two teams’ descriptions match up. If there are discrepancies, discuss why.

Then, make a point of establishing a canonical (i.e. correct and final) version. Ensure that each team understands their role in the funnel and which stages they are responsible for within it.

Next, ask both teams to discuss what friction points they’ve encountered in the funnel. Which parts of it (if any) aren’t working as effectively as they could be?

You’ll probably find that both Sales and Marketing have very different experiences to contribute here. This is why it’s so important to work together.

Likely friction points might include:

• A lack of IQLs (information qualified leads) or MQLs (marketing qualified leads). These are the leads at the very top of the funnel. IQLs typically provide contact details – email address and name – in exchange for some type of useful content. MQLs are similar, but specifically responded positively to some sort of marketing endeavor like a webinar, slide deck, guest post, or video.
• A lack of SQLs (sales qualified leads). These are the leads at the bottom of the funnel, ready and reaching out to get specific details in order to buy.
• High numbers of unqualified SQLs (i.e. poorly or incorrectly qualified leads).

• High churn rate or low number of repeat customers (i.e. poor customer retention).
• Conflicting targets. Marketing may be KPI-ed on generating a certain number of MQLs per month, but that number may be unmanageable for the Sales team. Or the high target may be impacting quality, leading to a lot of wasted time for Sales.
• A lack of useful, practical sales assets. At 81% of highly aligned companies, Sales and Marketing collaborate on how to use content, compared to just 25% of low-aligned companies.

You can only tackle these friction points once you know what they are, and you can tackle them most effectively when all parties responsible for creating and converting leads are involved.

Now that you know where your biggest points of friction are in getting leads, converting them, and keeping your customers, you need to decide on the best ways to reduce that friction (or get rid of it altogether):

• A lack of IQLs or MQLs may be mitigated by switching up how you approach organic and paid search. If you don’t have enough high volume traffic entering the funnel, you need to find better ways to cast a wider net.
• You might increase SQLs by ensuring Sales and Marketing are collaborating effectively to create content that’s answering common bottom-of-the-funnel queries and pushing IQLs and MQLs to the next stage of the funnel. Up to 80% of the content created by marketing departments goes unused. Why? It’s not aligned with any particular target at any specific stage of the funnel, so the sales department has no need for it.
• If Marketing is wasting the sales team’s time with too many poorly-qualified SQLs, ensuring Marketing understands what makes a great lead could tip the scales in the right direction. A thorough, detailed, and written definition of each type of lead shared and used by all can quickly fix the problem.

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• You could make a positive difference to customer retention through effective customer follow-ups, loyalty schemes and reward programs, or by improving your customer onboarding experience.

“For most businesses, there are two key milestones that need to be reached before a customer can reach their full value potential:

• The moment they sign up for your product, and…
• The moment they achieve their first ‘success’ with your product

A disproportionate amount of your customer churn will take place between (1) and (2). That’s where customers abandon your product because they get lost, don’t understand something, don’t get value from the product, or simply lose interest.

To minimize that initial churn, smart businesses focus on onboarding: the process by which you help a customer go from (1) to (2).” Len Markidan, Head of Marketing at Groove

I would also encourage you to look at how marketing automation can help you reduce friction points not only more effectively, but more efficiently. Consider:

• 91% of the most successful marketers believe that automation is “very important” to their campaign success
• Automation can generate a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead
• 80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in their number of leads, and 77% experienced higher conversions

“Thousands of marketers today rely on email marketing to generate results. They send blast email after blast email to their entire list of prospects and customers, hoping the message resonates with some of them and gets them to purchase. But does it work? Hard to tell.

Perhaps it works for you sometimes, but the reality of the situation is this:

• You’re wasting your valuable time and money marketing to someone who may not be interested in what you’re sharing.
• You could be burning your list (i.e. annoying your contacts and causing them to jump ship leaving you with no opportunity to market to them in the future).” Alyssa Rimmer, Director of Marketing for New Breed Marketing, writing for HubSpot

If you’re doing something similar to what’s described above, you’re already utilizing marketing automation – but you’re not utilizing it as effectively as you could be.

To improve the effectiveness of your marketing automation, you need to implement workflows that send targeted messages in accordance with how the recipient has previously interacted with you.

Let’s say your Marketing and Sales teams work together to create an ebook designed to target a specific pain point that’s common to your bottom-of-the-funnel leads.

You distribute an email campaign targeted at all your current IQLs (Information Qualified Leads).

A few days later, you send a reminder to those who haven’t opened the email or downloaded the ebook.

Those who have opened the email but not downloaded the ebook get a different email. They’re asked if they had any problems accessing the book, or if it wasn’t applicable to them. They’re then asked if they would like information on anything else, instead.

A different email is sent to those who have downloaded the ebook. They are thanked for downloading the book and offered additional content that may help move them further along the sales funnel.

A customer who accesses the additional piece of content is likely now an SQL. That final action may trigger a notification to sales that the lead is ready to be contacted by a member of their team.

This is marketing automation done right, but it becomes all the more effective when Sales and Marketing are working together to create lead-generating content and email workflows.

Define the Ideal Lead

Four in five leads never convert into sales. 

This is a problem. A big one. And it speaks to a general lack of understanding about what actually makes for a quality lead, instead of just another entry in a CRM.

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Poorly-qualified leads are a massive pain point for salespeople, and why wouldn’t they be? Like all of us, they only have so many hours in their day and a finite amount of time to talk to people.

Salespeople don’t want to be spending time “nurturing” leads that aren’t ready to buy (or would never buy, period), and you shouldn’t want or expect them to.

“Many companies don’t do enough upfront work to qualify their new sales leads. They simply pass every single sales lead through to the sales team, even if the prospect is nowhere near ready to buy or is even a good fit for what the company sells.” Gregg Schwartz, writing for iAcquire

Better quality leads means more conversions for your sales team (and for you). So how do you improve the quality of your leads?

By getting Sales and Marketing to work together to define the ideal lead.

Generally, your salespeople will be guiding the way in this conversation. They are the ones on the front line with your leads and are responsible for converting them, after all. Their experience is priceless.

That said, your Marketing team should have access to data collected earlier in the sales cycle that can prove invaluable in defining the ideal lead, too. Ask them to identify shared traits in those that convert (as well as those that don’t).

This is something that should be discussed in your initial meeting and in subsequent meetings. Data and knowledge will be gained over time that can help refine and tweak the description of the ideal lead, so it’s important to revisit the topic.

What to do

Ahead of your initial meeting, ask your Sales and Marketing teams to do some prep work.

Sales should think carefully about the best leads they’ve been sent and what it was that made them so useful. Marketing should collect customer data and identify shared traits or patterns in behavior.

Then, get them together to share the data. Come up with a detailed, concrete, explicit definition for each lead recognized in your funnel: IQL, MQL, and SQL.

Develop Customer Personas

The process of defining the ideal lead benefits all, but it’s first and foremost for the benefit of your salespeople.

Developing customer personas is a similar process, but with more of a Marketing focus. However, when you develop effective personas, everyone benefits. Companies that exceed their lead and revenue goals are twice as likely to create personas as companies that miss their targets.

The idea is to create at least one (but ideally more) highly-descriptive personas that embody the customer (or customers) your company is trying to target. They should illustrate typical customers at each stage of the sales funnel. Done right, they should prove to be invaluable when devising marketing campaigns.

“Buyer personas (sometimes referred to as marketing personas) are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. Personas help us all – in marketing, sales, product, and services – internalize the ideal customer we’re trying to attract, and relate to our customers as real humans. Having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.” Pamela Vaughan, Manager of Web Strategy at HubSpot

One key step in creating customer personas is to talk to your customers. Ask them questions. Find out as much about them as you possibly can. And then find out some more.

You can do this through pop-up surveys, post-purchase surveys, and online survey tools that include:

• SurveyMonkey (four tiers from free to $99/month)
• SurveyGizmo (from $0 to $195/month)
• Survicate (plans start at $249/month)
• Crowdsignal (from $0 to $75/month)
• Qualaroo (starting at $199/month)

Getting real, voice-of-the-customer answers is worth the investment. It’s a goldmine.

Another great place to learn about your audience is LinkedIn. You can browse through the profiles of your ideal customers and analyze their profiles and posts. You will quickly learn about their experience and interests.

You can also use LinkedIn for sales prospecting later when you start implementing the funnel. It has a powerful tool called LinkedIn sales navigator that makes this easy. It is ideal for businesses that implement account-based marketing.”

It also pays to arrange in-depth interviews with a handful of your best customers, or invite them to take part in focus groups. Both approaches offer great opportunities to really dig deep.

You can (and should) also leverage your salespeople in this process. The hands-on experience they get with your customers means they should have knowledge and information you’re never going to get from a survey. Chances are, you’d struggle to replicate it even in a face-to-face interview.

What to do

Ahead of your initial meeting, ask your salespeople to create profiles of the three most typical customers they talk to. They don’t have to be overly-detailed at this point (although the more detail they can add, the better) but there should be enough information to start painting a picture of the customers you, and your salespeople, deal with most often.

Ask your marketing team to bring along any information they already have about your customers, whether this has been gained through surveys, interviews, or purchased demographic data (chances are, if you’ve not tried to create customer personas before, you’ll only have purchased demographic data to go on).

You might even opt to outsource to a service that specializes in this sort of thing – such as Quantcast – to collect and/or analyze the data for you.

In the meeting itself, start to bring this information together. Identify common traits in the typical customers your salespeople have described, and where possible or necessary, merge them together.

Use data provided by your marketing team to flesh out the personas and decide which ones you’re going to work with from this point on.

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Remember that you’re not looking to finalize your personas in this initial meeting. Once your team understands the purpose of personas, they should be able to go away and build on them. Your goal initially is to get in place – at a minimum – an outline for each of your customer personas.

So, that’s three key discussion points I encourage you to cover in this initial meeting. In summary, by the end of it you should aim to:

• Ensure that all involved understand what’s happening, why, and the processes involved in facilitating this collaboration.
• Get everyone at least a little excited about what’s happening and how it can benefit them.
• Identify your sales funnel.
• Identify friction points in that funnel.
• Define the ideal lead.
• Draw up some basic customer personas (at a minimum – it’s fine if they’re more than basic, too!)

It’s probably a wise idea to draft a Sales and Marketing Service Level Agreement (SLA) that clearly states the roles and responsibilities of each department, all relevant definitions, and buyer personas. Make it easily accessible to everyone in both departments so someone can sneak a peek if they need a quick reminder.

This will take some time and effort, but will pay for itself 100 times over once it’s in place.

The Ongoing Process

That initial meeting is critical, but the real magic happens after. Let’s look at how you can ensure this collaboration continues.

One of the most important steps is to set up regular meetings between Sales and Marketing. From my experience, there are two big benefits to doing this:

1. Planning & Troubleshooting

You need to get your Sales and Marketing leaders talking regularly. At Mailshake and Zoomshift, I make them do a one-on-one every week. 

At first, I’d join them to ensure things went smoothly, but pretty soon it became an opportunity for them to discuss the stuff they really needed to be talking about, like:

• Lead quality
• What’s working
• What’s not
• Wat the close rate is
• What type of customers
• Customer feedback

As a founder, my involvement in those meetings isn’t the important thing. What matters is that I was there to set up the meeting cadence and get these two key leaders talking.

The faster this feedback loop happens, the more you optimize your efforts, and the more efficient your whole operation becomes.

A team that has this weekly cadence isn’t going to waste money chasing after the wrong customer. They’re going to figure out, “This customer’s better, this customer’s worse,” and adjust their marketing efforts accordingly. And they’ll do it much quicker than if that feedback loop didn’t exist, or if it happened less frequently, or if Sales and Marketing only met when a problem came up.

Think about it: how long does it take to identify a problem? If you don’t meet regularly, it could be months!

Realistically, it takes at least one quarter, because that’s when you look at the results, see that something didn’t work, and put a new plan in place. You adjust stuff within your department. And then boom, another quarter goes by, so you’re potentially three to six months down the road, and you’ve only just got a solution in place. That’s way too long.

But if you have the weekly meeting cadence in place between Sales and Marketing, you can usually figure this stuff out within two or three weeks.

2. Understanding the Customer

Sales and Marketing both think they know everything there is to know about the customer. But they don’t.

Marketing knows the customer from a theoretical and quantitative perspective, but they don’t know the “real” customer.

Sales knows the customer from a qualitative and relationship perspective. But they don’t know how to get the customer’s attention.

Both of those skills don’t necessarily need to be learned, but they absolutely need to be shared. That information needs to be passed along.

Opportunities for Sales & Marketing Collaboration

Collaborate in Meetings

It might sound simple, but the value of meetings between Sales and Marketing really can’t be overstated. Almost three-quarters of highly aligned companies run daily or weekly Sales and Marketing meetings, vs. only a quarter of low-aligned companies. 

Both Sales and Marketing should be able to bring knowledge and ideas to the table that can benefit the other party. This is why collaborating in meetings ought to be your first step in getting them to work together successfully. Specifically this means:

Setting Regular Department Head Meetings

As mentioned above, getting your sales and marketing leaders to meet regularly is key. If you don’t do this already, ensure your heads of departments are meeting up on at least a monthly basis (weekly is better). You can employ a collaboration software to help focus on your workflow and communicate easily wherever you are.

Running Joint Brainstorming Sessions

If your Marketing team usually brainstorms amongst themselves, it’s time to invite Sales along to the party, too.

Your Sales team is on the front line with customers. They may well have ideas that those who are a little more behind-the-scenes would never think of. Their input in brainstorming sessions could be invaluable.

Of course, bear in mind that an effective brainstorming session should include no more than 10 participants. If, combined, your Sales and Marketing teams exceed this number, arrange for members of your Sales team to take part in brainstorming sessions in rotation.

The first step to a productive brainstorming session is to come prepared with a powerful question.

“If I were given an hour in which to do a problem upon which my life depended, I would spend 40 minutes studying it, 15 minutes reviewing it and 5 minutes solving it.” ~Albert Einstein

When conducting a group session, try implementing one of these battle-tested techniques:

1. Nominal Group – individuals anonymously write down their ideas, which are then collected and voted on/discussed as a group
2. Team Idea Mapping – similar to the nominal group technique, only collected ideas are first grouped into themes.
3. Group Passing – one person makes a suggestion which is then passed to the next person who adds their own thoughts to it before passing to the next person, and so on.
4. Directed – similar to group passing, but each subsequent person tries to improve upon the passed idea.

Brainstorming sessions can be tremendously valuable, but it does take time, effort, and prep to do them correctly. Otherwise, they can quickly become a colossal waste of everyone’s time.

Get Sales Involved in Content Creation

Idea generation should be only the start of how you bring your Sales team into your content creation. There are many ways they can help during the content creation process, too. This might include:

• Shortlisting ideas that resulted from brainstorming sessions.
• Working together to tailor content to the needs of prospects and customers at each stage of the funnel.

• “Testing” ideas on prospects. A simple “Is this something you would be interested in/would it benefit you?” can go a long way.
• Recommending subject experts to speak to from within their network
• Reviewing research and briefs and adding their two cents where possible.

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They don’t have to be there every step of the way, but some input from Sales at key stages of the creative process could prove priceless.

“60% of content created in the marketing department was never used, I also found out that 90% of content we were creating was product-specific despite the fact that 90% of our audience were in an early-stage part of the buyer stage and asking non-product specific questions.’’ ~Michael Brenner

Remember to encourage your salespeople to share content where possible, too.

Create content that allows for sales department customization wherever possible. This is mutually beneficial. It increases the visibility of the marketing team’s work, and may help salespeople close leads when the content answers questions in more detail than they’re able to themselves.

Facilitate Sharing and Communication

Make it easy for both departments to share information and communicate. This is critical if you want your Sales and Marketing teams to develop natural working relationships.

Paperflite is your go-to content platform to manage all your sales and marketing content with ease.

It empowers your customer-facing teams to find the right content, instantly create personalized micro-sites and share them, and make sure that the customer or prospect gets the best experience of consuming your content.

The content intelligence feature tracks how prospects engage with your content in real-time and helps move your sales forward.

To facilitate sharing and communication you can:

Arrange Social Events

For Sales and Marketing to work together as effectively as possible, it’s important – just as with any people who collaborate at work – for them to like and get to know each other.

Casual social events in which the pressure of work is lifted and your staff is able to relax and be themselves can help drive bonds that extend inside the workplace, too.

This is something I’ve always pushed as being especially important at all companies I’ve worked at – not just between Sales and Marketing, but for all members of staff.

I’ll pay for some beers at happy hour or take teams out to lunch. Sometimes I might just buy a box of donuts. Anything to get people away from their desks and bonding in ways that don’t involve their work is great in my book.

Utilize an Internal Collaboration Tool

Tools like Slack facilitate better communication between teams. They act as a platform for sharing updates and information, and they enable staff members to stay in touch and up to speed regardless of where or when they’re working.

They’re invaluable for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of internal communications. Nothing I’ve tried personally has worked better.

Tech Republic’s Nick Heath covered a great case study from The Sunday Times, illustrating just how effective tools like Slack can be. Quoting production editor Matthew Taylor’s description of how reporters and editors at the paper were sharing ongoing news stories, the article states:

“Every day they would post all the stories they wanted to follow into a Google document, then email that document around to everyone and have [a new] one every hour. It would just go on and on and on and the data was lost almost immediately. So I was like, ‘That’s insane, you’re insane’. You have to find a better way to do this.

So we just built a Slack channel up where all these links and Tweets are all posted. That’s been fantastic.”

Tools like Slack are customizable to the needs of your company. Slack, specifically has two primary functions: channels and direct messages.

Direct messages are essentially an instant messaging service. You use it to have private conversations with one (or more) coworker(s).

Channels are like “groups.” Each channel will have a theme and users can “subscribe” to channels that are relevant to what they do. You can also create private channels, if you want to restrict subscribers to specific people.

What this means in context is that you might create a channel for your Sales team, another for your Marketing team, and ask all members of each team to subscribe to both channels. You might then also create a “Sales and Marketing” channel that’s used for any information or updates that could apply to both teams.

65% of sales reps state they have problems finding content to send to prospects, and much of what marketing creates may never see the light of day. Used correctly, Slack presents an easy way to overcome this.

There’s no shortage of fantastic collaboration tools and services out there to explore besides Slack:

• Asana is a collaborative organizer that allows users to schedule, assign, track, comment, share, and remind about tasks and projects
• Ryver is a free communication and task management tool
• Trello and similar alternatives uses boards, lists, and cards to organize and share projects and tasks with team members

• Basecamp touts itself as the project management and team communication service, and it’s hard to argue with their claim. It’s your all-in-one, “central source of truth”
• There are, of course, many other tools. Find the one that fits your budget, your team, and your needs

Incentivize Collaboration

Ultimately, Sales and Marketing are far more likely to work well together when it’s in their mutual interests to do so.

Sure, from a business perspective, it obviously makes sense for those teams to collaborate effectively. But what are the actual, tangible reasons for a Marketing person to start putting the needs of the Sales team first, and vice versa?

Start by aligning their goals. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no point in targeting your Marketing team to generate 1,000 leads a month if your salespeople only have the resource to handle a couple of dozen. Likewise, you don’t want Marketing running a campaign aimed at retailers if your Sales team has far more success speaking to hospitality companies.

To set your joint Sales and Marketing targets, start with your overarching goal and work backward. 

You want to generate $X of revenue next year; how much of that needs to come from new sales? 

Based on your historic conversion rate, how many SQLs do you need every month to achieve that?

And how many of your MQLs turn into SQLs?

(Also, remember to tightly define terms like “MQL” and “SQL” so there’s no doubt whether or not those goals have been achieved.)

Pro tip: Try out these smart post COVID-19 marketing tactics, along with this COVID Support Plan, to help your brand and business in 2021.

Teams Will Align on Lead Qualification

If your marketing team is simply passing off every potential lead to sales without qualifying them, you’ve got a big problem on your hands. Mainly, it has to do with wasted time.

Every time a salesperson spends time on a lead that isn’t properly qualified, it results in lost revenue. The reason is simple — they could have been prospecting or having a call with someone truly qualified to pull the trigger and purchase your product.

Lead scoring is a good way to get sales and marketing on the same page. Instead of relying on independent judgment, you are relying on a system. 

Someone downloads a PDF? That’s a certain amount of points. Someone requests a demo? Even more points. At a certain point, a lead will naturally be ready for the handoff to sales, streamlining the collaboration between both teams.

Companie Won’t See Sales and Marketing As Separate

Obviously, there are different skills involved with sales and marketing respectively. However, that does not mean they are necessarily separate. While they are individual departments at a company, they work on the same goal: guiding leads and prospects to becoming paid customers.

The main difference, of course, is that marketing handles prospects and leads higher up in the funnel, whereas salespeople focus on the bottom half of the funnel. But each team is equally important and needs to be on the same team.

A lot of companies experience in-fighting between their sales and marketing. While the Director of Sales wants to try one approach, the Chief Marketing Officer may take a much different stance. 

When this happens, always remember — you’re playing at the same time. In today’s day and age, sales and marketing collaboration is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.

Tools

To adjust to the shift that sales and marketing will undergo, you’ll need some great tools. Here are some of the tools that are bound to become key advantages for teams that take advantage of them:

Woorise

Woorise is one of the most useful tools for bringing sales and marketing into collaboration. It allows your team to make virtual giveaways, mimicking offline sweepstakes in an online fashion.

With Woorise, you can also make landing pages, surveys, quizzes, and forms with a simple drag and drop tool. It’s great for giving marketing more information (and easy content) while sending more leads to sales.

Intercom

Intercom is a business platform that gives companies deeper insight into their communications and interactions with customers. It gives your sales team what they need to send highly targeted communications.

Since Intercom is so heavily focused on observing consumer behavior, it assists you in understanding where in your funnel customers get stuck. This is a life saver for marketing teams, as they can create new content or change the messaging to keep prospects sliding towards your sales reps.

Loom 

A newcomer, Loom has quickly become a household name for sales and marketing departments. It’s an easy-to-use Chrome extension that helps you make custom videos in seconds.

You can share product information to close a deal, or give a high level overview of your business on your landing page. Loom also helps sales and marketing agents speed up the communication cycle by sending quick videos back and forth.

In summary, your ongoing sales and marketing collaboration process should include:

• Monthly or weekly head of department meetings
• Collaboration between sales and marketing in brainstorming sessions
• Input from sales throughout the content-creation process
• Regular social events
• Use of an internal collaboration tool that facilitates communication between teams anytime, anywhere
• Effective sharing of content and other resources between Sales, Marketing, and customers

Avoma 

Avoma is an AI Meeting Assistant, Collaboration, and Intelligence platform for working remotely. Save hours in note-taking and improve meeting outcomes with active participation.

Image: Pixabay

Do your sales and marketing teams currently working together? In what ways do they collaborate, and how effective do you find them to be? What other tools would you recommend it make it all happen? As always, please leave your thoughts and questions in the comments below: