Marketing and Sales, the two dynamic departments approaching the same goals with different tactics. Both the teams always struggle to work together, these two teams should be working side by side, if not the misalignment between these teams will cost your company 10% of revenue per year. But, this misalignment usually occurs when each team creates separate goals and strategies from one another. Before knowing the ways to increase the communication between the teams, let's see why the communication between sales and marketing team is important:
When sales and marketing communicate properly you can reap a whole lot of benefits, whereas if the teams don't communicate properly, you risk broken processes and inconsistent metrics. Research says that highly aligned B2B companies achieve 18% faster revenue growth and 16% higher profitability than those where the teams don't align.
Better use of resources leads to increased productivity - when the marketing team will be aware of sales initiatives and organizational goals and they can provide the sales team with industry data and best practice content to engage with prospects in a better way, on the other hand, the sales team can help marketing in creating content that their prospects are looking for, this in return leads to better customer experience and gives organizations increased productivity.
To sum it up, good communication between marketing and sales empowers reps to have value-add conversations, increases the organization's productivity, maximizes resources, and improves the customer experience.
Now let's see the 5 best ways to increase correspondence of sales and marketing to uncover bigger opportunities and increase overall revenue by working together.
Go to the top: obtain support from Leadership - The success of your communication initiatives depends on the level of support and participation from executive leadership, if the leaders of the teams get along and start the communication initiatives and set an example for their team the rest of them will likely follow. It is the responsibility of leadership to monitor the communication of the sales and marketing departments which requires a consistent implementation and custom of information sharing and instituting cultural change in the organization.
Build your Tech Stack: use technology to support communication initiatives - Technology makes things easier, even in aligning the marketing and sales communications. Use technology that is accessible and easily incorporated by the two department's workflows. Various tools enable sales teams to determine what content most effectively advances deals at the highest ROI and using this data marketing team can gain insight into what content works and helps them focus their time and optimize their efforts. With these pieces of information, both sales and marketing teams can benefit from making informed decisions about strategy and process.
Reach on a common consensus & encourage frequent interaction: Sales and marketing are the two sides of the same coin, marketing attracts potential clients and sales wins them over. Both the team should understand each other's roles, come to a common consensus about the onboarding process and get a more holistic view of the customer experience also interact more frequently to incorporate the perspectives of each other with these consumers will receive more targeted and timely messaging from your company.
Determine KPI's together: The end game of both the teams is to drive revenue, when they share the same performance metrics (such as goals, priorities, benchmark, and measure progress)they can work effectively and drive higher revenue. Along with the metrics, teams need to share data in decision-making as with Data the marketing team knows what content to create and sales teams know what content to share. With both the teams knowing what is working, the areas to be improved and the opportunities for news and improved strategies organization's success grows.
Address any conflicts that hinder cooperation: Just making both the teams work together doesn't take you towards success, you need to prevent the teams from conflicts or any misunderstanding. It's not an easy task to do, often the sales team blames leads if they don't make their quota, and in turn the marketing team questions if sales engaged the leads with the provided timing and frequency they deserved. To avoid this plan ahead by deciding on the criteria for a quality lead, agreeing on desired lead flow, and determining the optimal stage for marketing to hand leads off to sales.
We all know getting sales and marketing teams to coexist in harmony is no easy feat, but it's a worthwhile goal to achieve lasting success. These ways will help your organization overcome the communication problem and improve your departmental alignment and ultimately drives bottom-line results.