The importance of good collaboration between Marketing and Sales
Cooperation between marketing and sales is essential to achieving commercial success. Creating a harmonious relationship between these two departments can lead to more results and better leads and ultimately healthier sales.
Everyone knows that working together leads to better performance, after all, when we all have the same goal, we are moving in the right direction. However, practice proves more recalcitrant. There is no standard blueprint for good collaboration between marketing and sales and interests are often, however conflicting, too different. It's about the interplay between people, knowledge and budget where communication is the common thread to success.
People and communication
Smooth communication between marketing and sales is crucial for successful collaboration. Open communication is the key to sharing information and feedback between the two departments. You achieve this by scheduling regular meetings to discuss weekly progress and feedback but also by using tools such as Microsoft Teams or Slack to chat directly with each other to ensure short lines of communication. In this way, sales can respond to the leads delivered by marketing so that marketing can adjust campaigns in a timely manner and Team marketing can inform sales about ongoing campaigns and share knowledge about insights gained and interesting trends. By being open to each other's insights and feedback, marketing and sales teams can work together to realize leads that convert faster into successful deals.
Knowledge
Whereas Marketing is responsible for attracting leads in the top of the funnel, sales focuses on converting these leads to customers, at the bottom of the funnel. A deep and complete picture of the customer journey is crucial for good funnel management and therefore for everyone in the organization involved in realizing leads. The importance of identifying the various touchpoints, where potential customers interact with the company, can answer how/what/why questions. For many organizations, a lead is basically nothing more than a set of contact information such as first name/surname, company name, phone number and email address. By understanding the customer journey from the beginning and sharing it with sales and business development, you as a marketing team add value and you as sales can make the difference when you first make contact. After all, you are well informed and can tailor your questions and pitch to the route the prospect has taken. By understanding the customer journey together, marketing and sales can tailor their efforts to the specific needs and expectations of potential contacts.
Budget and targets
One of the most important steps in getting marketing and sales to work together is to understand the different targets in order to identify what the two teams' common goals are and where the organization is moving in the longer term. Identifying shared targets ensures that both departments speak the same language and are motivated to work together to achieve these goals. It is important to define clear and measurable goals that are used by both marketing and sales teams. These goals can range from increasing brand awareness, generating leads to increasing sales where the center of focus is different between marketing and sales. Marketing will be much more up front in the process, where sales will have to follow up and convert the lead (is it even a lead?) to a win. When you make sure that the targets of both teams are well aligned and have the right interfaces, it yields more cooperation with undoubted success as a result!
Use of technology by marketing & sales
Technology is indispensable in our marketing and sales approach. However, it is important that both teams know from each other what tooling is being used and what the benefits of that tooling are. Increasingly, marketing and sales are pushing software solutions together, yet we also see both departments using their own tooling. Think of systems that marketers like to use such as tooling for ads like Google Ads or Campaignmanager from LinkedIn. But also tools like SalesFeed what Provides insight into website visitors are interesting resources for marketers. Sales, on the other hand, often works with tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and CRM. By searching for and integrating the most interesting tooling together, marketing and sales teams can share data and gain better insight into the performance of their efforts.
Conclusion
The ideal collaboration between marketing and sales is important for lead generation success. By making the customer journey transparent for everyone, aligning goals, sharing knowledge and integrating tooling, you can achieve success together! The greatest chance of success is achieved through good agreements and clear communication!
