Can Sales and Marketing be best friends?

Sales and Marketing are often ‘frenemies’. Sadly, the very people who need one another and see each other’s worth (sometimes more than others in a company), often find themselves being quick to criticise each other. 

With both teams at the front-end of staying in touch with existing clients and reaching new ones, their misalignment can have a huge impact on a business. In fact, according to Wheelhouse Advisors, those with successful Marketing and Sales team alignment are said to have:

·      208% increase in revenue.

·      38% increase in deal closure.

·      36% in customer retention.

So given these clear business benefits, how can you cultivate a healthy relationship between Sales and Marketing?

Together from day one!

Ideally Sales and Marketing should be structured to always work together. This should include embedding best practice to ensure that neither falls into the old habits of starting an initiative without engaging the other.

However, even if you cannot change the way your Sales and Marketing teams are structured there are ways you can improve the relationship.

Start by putting together a Sales and Marketing team on every new campaign at its conception. We all know the feeling of being left out of an initiative, only to be looped in at the last minute when you could have made a valuable contribution much earlier in the process. The resultant disengagement limits the success of a campaign.

Get everyone on the same page from ideation stage to create the plan and objectives and keep everyone updated on progress. There’s nothing worse than expecting content and promising it to a contact, only to find out it’s been delayed, and you could have helped move it along.

Be present

The simplest way to get to know and understand each other is to be present. Attending each other’s meetings is the easiest way to do this, either by nominating someone each week from your team to attend the other team’s meeting and vice versa or, more efficiently, making it one meeting. 

I’ve heard many excuses why this ‘won’t work’ and the gap between Sales and Marketing remains every time the excuse is used. However, every time I have seen this implemented the relationship between Sales and Marketing has been much more successful.

Clarify how roles and responsibilities will work

Roles and responsibilities often become blurred between Sales and Marketing. This can leave people feeling frustrated, unheard and annoyed. 

A major part of the problem is the historic view that Marketing is at the A & I and Sales at the D and A of AIDA. As a result, Marketing struggle to evidence their part in winning work and feel safer aligning themselves to brand metrics than ROI, while Sales feel frustrated that they are exposed and accountable while Marketing are ‘hiding’ in the background.

While AIDA is a great model, buyers have changed so much that today Sales and Marketing need to work together the whole way through the funnel for best impact. 

Highlighting common goals to drive growth and revenue and increase brand awareness makes this the responsibility of both teams, and that in this new world its ok for roles to overlap. Sales and Marketing should always be drawing on each other’s strengths and learning from each other. 

Consider that maybe these teams sometimes tread on each other’s toes because they are working towards the same goals!

Lead by example 

Sales and Marketing leaders must set the example by never openly criticising the other function and giving genuine praise where credit is due. Congratulating the wider combined team where something goes well is also essential – start to celebrate joint success!

Meet regularly as leaders and feed back to your teams so they can see you are already seeing collaboration as the key to overall success.

Know your audiences

Sales and marketing are trying to achieve the same thing – to drive and build revenue. But it’s hard to be aligned if everyone has a different idea of who the buyer is and what their journey looks like.

Work together to review and define your buyer personas, using whatever information you have including anecdotal stories from those on the front line. A good understanding of the buyer enables everyone to understand who you want to be winning work from so they can spot opportunities.

Follow this by completing the journey for each buyer by capturing what a typical experience looks like. While no two buyers are the same, you can agree information that is worth knowing to inform sales and marketing decisions. This could include what information they consume before speaking to the company, ways they like to be communicated with, and the average sales cycle for that demographic. 

Getting content out there together

A lot of time and effort goes into creating content but there is zero point in it, if it isn’t being taken to market. 

While Marketing can use a variety of channels to get content out there, surely having it in the hands of those directly speaking to existing and potential clients is the best channel of all?

By working together, you can not only agree the best time to launch a campaign but also draw upon each other’s strengths to be even more impactful. For example, bring together Marketing’s knowledge of tone of voice with Sales’ knowledge of selling techniques to create email nurture chains that challenge the traditional and use the data collected to refine your approach. 

Sales enablement

Sales enablement provides information, content, and resources to help Salespeople sell, and is therefore critical to campaign success. It sounds simple, but it can be very difficult, mainly because the Marketing team are usually expected to create a sales tool with no input from the Sales team. 

At a basic level, it is as simple as ensuring Marketing and Sales can access all files and information using the same system. 

At a more mature level, when creating campaigns, it is worth having the sales conversation front and centre to help you to work together to come up with tools that facilitate consultative selling conversations, and then refining them over time with feedback from use with clients.

Feedback & Reporting

Feedback is not only essential to the success of a current campaign but for the success of future campaigns.  

Direct, specific, and constructive feedback is essential for any high-performing team, but it’s often overlooked when it comes to Sales and Marketing collaboration. Sales and Marketing should work together to evidence how a campaign they have worked on has achieved success and what they learnt from it.

Be empathetic

One of the biggest misconceptions between Sales and Marketing is the assumption that the other is doing something for their own benefit. The reality is that all too often, they are working towards the same outcome but have very different challenges and expectations on them along the way.

Ask your team to view a situation from their colleague’s perspective and be empathetic. Constantly remind them that everyone has their own pressures and if they can understand where the other person is coming from, they will be more likely to find a common ground and a solution that works for all.

Be clear with both teams that decisions are being made with good intent, which will dramatically improve how they take initiative and encourage them to feed back in a productive rather than negative manner.

Sales and Marketing can work amazingly well together, and when that happens it is the greatest feeling on earth to succeed together and celebrate success.

#marketing #salesenablement #b2bmarketing