Alignment of sales and marketing is crucial for your success. Incohesive sales and marketing strategies result in wasted resources and a poor return on your investment.
If you combine marketing and sales, you’ll more easily monitor results, motivate your sales staff and make improvements in brand awareness for more qualified leads, a stronger customer base, bigger deals and enhanced margins en route to higher profits.
Marketing and sales teamwork
Typically, when profits aren’t optimized sometimes it’s because the wrong people are on the sales staff or the marketing creates images that can’t be met by sales.
But, it’s also safe to assume when the marketing and salespeople aren’t on the same page, they often don’t speak the same language.
That’s ironic for professionals who are supposed to be good communicators. Instead, there are often turf battles. Marketing people often think they’re the only ones who are strategic thinkers.
… there are often turf battles. Marketing people often think they’re the only ones who are strategic thinkers … Salespeople feel marketers aren’t carrying their own weight in generating sales leads.
They think salespeople can only see to the end of their noses and are only concerned about their monthly sales quotas.
Salespeople feel marketers aren’t carrying their own weight in generating sales leads. And so on.
Solutions
Get everyone on the same page:
- Starting with the senior executive, there needs to be a commitment for collaboration.
- The chief marketing officer and sales managers need to meet regularly, especially over lunch. Good things happen when people break bread together.
- The philosophy must filter down both staffs. Encourage interaction between marketing and sales teams.
- The two sides should continually work on talking the same language. Review and develop metrics for efficient accountability for both functions. Your sales and marketing teams should have joint key performance indicators.
- They should proactively look for weaknesses and breakdowns in communication, as well as in getting agreement for targeting the right customers.
- Develop a strong presence so that customers are very familiar with your brand before your salespeople even contact prospects.
- Cohesively create a single customer journey with a single customer experience.
- Train everyone on the same software for analytics, emailing and marketing automation.
- Consistently, there should be an agreement about marketing messaging, prospect leads and quality.
- Establish an ongoing reporting dialogue – input and feedback between marketing and sales.
- Use customer feedback. Everything should be tested.
- Create effective content marketing and assets for use by both marketing and sales to help close prospects and for the lifetime value of customers.
- Continue keeping salespeople in the marketing loop. Implement training programs so salespeople know how to use the marketing collateral.
From the Coach’s Corner, for the above reasons by design, this Biz Coach portal combines marketing and sales into one category, where you’ll find hundreds of business-coaching columns, for example:
6 Rules to Keep Your Pipeline Full for Continuous Sales — It doesn’t matter what type of business you have. Even if your sales are great today, there will come a time when sales will crawl to a halt unless you take precautionary measures to keep your sales pipeline full.
5 Critical Fundamentals to Build the Best Sales Staff — The crucial question: How can a company develop a top sales crew? Short answer: Start with a premise — if it were so easy then everybody would be doing it. Long answer: Some companies are achieving stellar sales results in complex global situations by adopting best practices.
Checklist – Top 18 Attributes of the Best Salespeople — What’s needed to be effective in sales? Merely having a gregarious personality will no longer cut it in the 21st century. As a manager, if you want to improve your company’s sales performance, become a winning sales organization and review your recruitment techniques in hiring salespeople.
Critical Essentials to Develop the Best Marketing Formula — There are critical essentials for marketing, which includes the right channels and developing the right message. That includes the right branding slogan and logo. Unless your targeting upscale consumers, many consumers prefer value marketing — not cute, which doesn’t necessarily mean selling at a lower price than your competitors.
B2B Telemarketing: Building Trust Should Be Your Goal…Here’s How — Telemarketing is, of course, a challenge. You must create a favorable first impression in your initial approach. This means building trust should be your primary goal. Sure, it’s a nerve-wracking process, especially because you have just a few fleeting moments to engage your prospects. Yes, you’re calling to make sales. Again, you’ll greatly enhance your chances if you focus on building trust.
There’s no job too simple for me to complicate.
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