The sales and marketing team are two key components of a successful business. In fact, one can’t really exist without the other. Well they can, but they would be in bad shape without a mutually symbiotic relationship. Sales and marketing need to be able to depend on one another – When these two areas of your organization find that ideal balance your business will succeed.
1. Start At The Top
The leaders of your sales and marketing teams need to be aligned. When key executives in each department are working together, it will trickle down to the broader team as well. If your leaders can set the example of how collaboration between sales and marketing works best, everyone else will follow suit. The right tone across the organization is vital for each and every employee to see the importance of the sales and marketing partnership.
2. Use Metrics, Not Surveys
Sales team members have a difficult enough time managing their daily schedule as it is; so receiving a survey from their marketing peers rarely goes over well. If the marketing team wants to understand the value of the collateral and content they provide to their peers, tracking and analyzing metrics is always more powerful and effective. Surveys tend to be vague and often very subjective. Metrics on the other hand, takes the burden off sales reps and provides hard data about the usage of content. Metrics allow you to see what is actually being used and what isn’t. Marketing can then proactively react to the needs of the sales team while adding value.
3. Don’t Add To The Noise
According to the American Marketing Association, 90% of content created by marketing is not used in the field. To prevent this from happening, your marketing team should make it easy for the sales team to find what they need; the easier it is to find, the more likely they are to use the material. When the sales team can access content and collateral quickly, they spend less time on admin work and more time in the field meeting with clients and prospects. Ultimately, the time and efficiency gained by the sales team can be used to enhance their alignment and understanding of your sales, marketing and brand strategies. Leveraging the right technology to address the challenge of content distribution (getting the right content to the right people) is vital to making this process successful.
4. Be Relevant — Be On Point
A key driver for all sales people is the importance of relevant and engaging content. The marketing team must conduct the right level of market research and industry focus to provide content that strikes a chord with prospects and customers. If the content is not on point, the sales team will side step marketing or sales ops and create their own material – this results in rouge messaging and creates a wider gap between the content creator and content consumers. The only way to effectively curb the creation of rogue content is to ensure that the content is relevant, up to date and easily discoverable.
5. Increase The Pipeline – Decrease The Funnel
If marketing can constantly increase the pipeline of the sales team, the alignment between the two groups becomes organic. Marketing should strive to enhance methods for a continuous rise of inbound prospects that can be passed along to the sales team to feed their pipeline with qualified prospected that are ready to make a buying decision. The sales team will be more willing to provide feedback from the field if they see that are influencing marketing collateral and decreasing the time prospects spend in the sales cycle. This is where a symbiotic relationship is critical to the ongoing success of both functions. The willingness to partner with marketing will only increase as the sales team sees that marketing is enhancing their ability to talk to more qualified leads and close deals faster.
What are you using to create a better sales and marketing alignment in your organization?
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