When your sales and marketing teams work well together, it’s like listening to an orchestra perform a symphony and hit every note. But what happens sales and marketing aren’t in tune? Well, that can be a problem.
A disconnect between sales and marketing can have an adverse impact on leads, sales, and revenue, not to mention less tangible, but no less important things like employee morale.
In this article, we’ll look at why the rifts between sales and marketing teams happen, and what you can do to repair them.
“Sales and marketing essentially do the same thing, right?”
That statement might seem true from the outside looking in, but it’s a dangerous misconception. Your sales team represents boots on the ground, dealing with prospects and customers in person. Marketing crafts the messaging for your company and creates content based on that message.
Sales can help marketing by providing – to continue the military metaphor – reports from the front: What do customers need? What makes them worry? What are their motivations? Knowing the answers to these questions can help the marketing team create more relevant content.
And marketing can help sales by providing more effective materials and messaging that draws in high-level contacts and leads.
By having both departments communicate regularly – to discuss what works and what needs work – you can make sure they are helping each other.
Do you have shared goals?
Sales and marketing have the same goal: Bring in more sales. Yet your sales team may be the only one responsible for meeting that goal. This isn’t to say that they do all the work, but the perception may be that all the weight of the goal is on their shoulders.
By setting goals that the two teams can share, you give them a reason to collaborate. How do you make that happen?
If you have a marketing automation system and a customer relationships management system, make sure they work together.
When you connect the two systems, you can trace every sale back to the lead where it began. This allows you to create a blueprint for future success, and identify potential pitfalls.
Have you closed the loop?
This is a concept we’ve written about before, the closed loop between marketing and sales. It’s a system where sales and marketing work together using marketing analysis data to qualify leads. The process works like this:
- Your website gets a visitor, and a cookie tracks their visit and how they came across your site. This allows you to gauge how well your marketing efforts are doing.
- You track what page the visitor looks at while they’re spending time on your site. When you see what gets them from one place to another, you have an easier time connecting your leads to their original marketing efforts.
- Your visitors arrive at a landing page that contains an offer: a video, an e-book, a webinar. To access this content, they must fill out a contact form. This is where your visitor becomes a lead.
- After your sales department makes contact and closes the lead, connect them back to the initial marketing campaign. This will help you gain insight into who your audience is and what kind of content you want to create for them.
Do you need help orchestrating your sales and marketing activities? IQnection can help. Contact us today to schedule your marketing consultation, and let us start getting your sales and marketing teams in tune.
