1. Marketing can warm up leads for sales

If you ask most salespeople what marketing is for, they would say it’s just a nudge in the right direction for leads but this helps to underline how sales and marketing can work together.

The truth is marketing can be much more than that. With input from the sales team, sales and marketing can devise a strategy to seamlessly transport the customer through the entire buying cycle, from awareness right down to finalising the sale.

Marketing can warm up the customer before allowing the sales team to take over to convert the warmed-up lead into a customer, making the sales team’s job much easier and increasing the number of leads converted.

2. Sales can help marketing better understand the customer

The salespeople spend all their time interacting with the customer, learning what challenges they face and what they want out of your products/service; therefore, the sales team can give a unique insight into what makes the customer tick from first-hand experience.

Using this information, marketers can then create more tailored strategies that target these issues and show how your company can solve them. By targeting their main wants/needs and offering solutions to their challenges at this early stage, you will find more leads are generated through marketing’s efforts.

3. Marketing can nurture cold leads

It’s in the sales team’s nature to go for the easiest targets. The hotter prospects are going to make quicker, simpler sales and help reach targets. But what happens to the more reluctant leads who need a little more time and effort to convert them?

Again, this shows how sales and marketing can work together. With marketing’s help, those cold leads don’t have to get pushed aside and left to start looking to competitors for solutions. A specialised prospect nurturing campaign can be put in place by marketers that will ensure cold leads do not slip away so easily and more conversions can be made.

4. Sales can give feedback on marketing efforts

It’s often difficult for marketers to truly gauge just how well-received their marketing messages are. For example, a salesperson at a company once said that they struggled to reach prospects with follow-up emails because the company’s email had been blocked. This was due to receiving too many irrelevant marketing emails, which annoyed the prospects!

With feedback like this being passed back to the marketing team, they can rectify serious issues like this. It’s also important for sales to pass back any other general feedback on how the prospects are receiving the marketing messages to help marketers improve their efforts. If the prospect likes the marketing efforts, they will be much more warmed up and open to making a sale when they meet the sales team, so it’s beneficial all around.

Creating one powerful team

1. Align your objectives

For sales and marketing to work well together, it’s important to be both working towards the same targets. Therefore, agreeing some mutual objectives will help to lead the ideas and efforts from both teams in the same direction.

One that are best met when aligned is the financial target; i.e. increasing the company’s revenue is a mutual objective of both sales and marketing teams. Another mutual objective is the type of customer you are both targeting. It is far less effective if the marketing team is targeting one buying persona and the sales team another.

2. Agree on responsibilities

When it comes to sales and marketing alignment, it’s important to clearly outline who is responsible for what throughout the entire lead lifecycle.

The lead lifecycle gives you a path to follow but each milestone still needs to be worked on by one team or the other or maybe both! When two teams combine, it’s easy to pass the responsibility, so clearly defining who does what and holding people accountable for tasks helps create structure for the team’s combined efforts.

3. Offer crossover training

Sales and marketing teams often do not fully understand the work each other is doing despite having very similar goals.

It can be beneficial to offer some insight or even crossover training to sales and marketing team members to bring them up to speed with how the other team works. Having a better understanding will help them to contribute more ideas and combine their efforts more effectively.

4. Hold regular joint team meetings

When working together, communication is everything. It’s vitally important that both sales and marketing know what is expected of them and what the other team are working on and how this impacts their work.

It can also beneficial to appoint a joint team head of operations to lead these meetings and bring both sides together. Choosing a team member from either team who is cooperative and open to the alignment will help to bridge the gap between the two teams.

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