Unleashing Synergy: Supercharge Your Business with Sales and Marketing Collaboration

No team is an island … except it seems when it comes to Sales and Marketing. More often than not, organizations create vast spaces between these two important departments and foster dysfunctional siloes rather than collaborative units working together to turn a stranger into a happy brand advocate.

By empowering your sales and marketing teams to work as a cohesive unit, you’re able to unlock significant efficiencies and enhancements for your business. From better leads, to a more seamless customer experience, through to higher deal conversions and improved customer satisfaction, getting sales and marketing teams to collaborate is a worthwhile pursuit.

However existing processes, structures and lack of support may be a stumbling block to getting this collaboration up and running.

The Importance Of Sales And Marketing Collaboration

A common mistake is to silo these teams from one another. An example of this would be where the sales team requests a new campaign to boost leads. Marketing does the initial research, crafts and develops the campaign, and hands over completed, sales enablement materials to the sales team. Sales then takes over and engages with potential customers, and proceeds to convert them to customers.

This cycle then repeats.

Neither team understands the other’s strategy and there is a vast abyss of shared knowledge and resources between the two. This is a mistake I initially made when taking over both the sales and marketing portfolios in a Saas enterprise. Looking back, being a conduit of information between the two crucial departments proved incredibly ineffective. We quickly realised we were missing out on opportunities and restructured things to foster collaboration.

For example, sales had brilliant insights from the field that could be integrated into integrated email campaigns to bring in a greater volume of better quality leads. And conversely marketing was quietly sitting on a wealth of data that sales could be using to pinpoint very hot leads that were likely to convert.

It was key for each team to foster a healthy understanding and respect for what the other team did. Marketing was responsible for creating awareness, which generated leads, which sales then turned them into customers. By working together, and sharing insights, Marketing could bring in better qualified leads, which Sales had a higher chance of converting.

Combining Forces In The CRM

It’s a great starting point to evaluate existing processes, structures and software to identify potential barriers to collaboration. One of the major stumbling blocks we identified was the CRM, because it was designed solely around sales efforts.

A huge project was carried out, to integrate marketing efforts into the CRM. Sales were able to quickly identify which of their prospects had engaged in a recent email campaign, and view what actions they had taken on the website. This meant they could narrow in on prospects, target the hottest leads first and craft a very tailored conversation.

TIP: When researching CRM software, analyze the integrations on offer and see how they compare to the current sales and marketing tools in your software stack. Having these integrations will foster great collaboration and knowledge sharing between the two teams.

Cross-Training

How do you get your teams to get a fresh perspective?

The marketing team underwent sales demonstration training, so they were able to understand what it was like to sell the product. They were also required to sit on demos when members of the sales team spoke with actual prospects, and attend on-site visits with key customers.

The Sales team were required to write up their own presentation slides, outreach emails, list-build and devise campaign ideas that they thought would resonate in their regions. Overall this worked well, because not only did it give each team more exposure to another facet of the business, but it also resulted in fresh ideas and new approaches to problem solving. We improved our pre-sales materials significantly, which helped improve the quality of leads coming through. We also identified new target audiences we had previously overlooked.

TIP: Pair team members together to encourage knowledge and insight sharing, and to help build better communication across departments.

Creating Space To Share

How best could we create the space to share and action deeply localized insights?

A general sales and marketing meeting was instituted every two weeks, and one of the primary aims of this was to share insights from the field. These insights would then be rolled back into campaigns. Marketing gave input and guidance on outbound sales strategy, which traditionally had been a remit of the sales team. This gave us a more cohesive approach when it came to turning a cold prospect into a happy customer.

In addition to this, there was a weekly sales and marketing meeting for each region. Here the teams got together to improve efforts on landing pages, email campaigns and social media posts. The email campaigns became highly targeted, and the messaging became deeply localized. While the product was still the same, how we spoke about the product to schools in Singapore, differed greatly to how we spoke about the product to those in North America. The results were marked improvements in open rates and click through rates, and of course sales inquiries.

Tip: Have someone take the minutes in these meetings, and rotate this responsibility each meeting. This was an invaluable resource and was a great way to ensure insights were carried through to action. It also helped new team members get up to speed quickly.

The Buyers And Their Journeys

The two teams worked together to refine the buyer personas and map out their journeys. This collaborative effort helped marketing uncover customer pain-points they had been unaware of. It also provided a lot of real world examples that sales shared on behalf of their customers, that both teams could draw from. The insights from this shared storytelling greatly improved our messaging and even the anecdotes the sales team shared in their online, product demos.

We also mapped the customer journey from awareness to closed deal. This helped each team understand their part in the journey, and the importance of everyone telling the same story, reinforcing key messaging at each stage. Sharing this visualization was incredibly beneficial for the sales team and helped us build a more cohesive brand experience for the customer.

TIP: Facilitate regular sessions throughout the project to collaborate and debrief on mapping out the buyer personas. This will help ensure deeper alignment between the two teams, and that all key insights are shared.

Set Common, Or Overlapping KPIs

What you choose to measure, you encourage. Measurement drives behavior, which then drives results. And if you’re not measuring anything, you really have no idea which way you’re moving.

KPIs for these two teams can often be miles apart, despite the functions needing to work hand in hand. By creating common KPIs, both teams are suddenly aligned towards the same goals. Good places to start are qualified leads and fit rate.The Fit rate refers to the number of conversations that your sales team needs to engage in, before finding a strong prospect. It’s the number of proposals / the number of conversations. E.g If your sales team speaks to 10 prospects before putting out a proposal, your fit rate is 10%.

Both teams focusing on increasing the fit rate, meant better leads coming into the funnel, and sales working harder on crafting tailored, meaningful conversations. Overall, the quality of incoming leads improved greatly.

Tip: Schedule a workshop between sales and marketing teams to brainstorm shared goals and KPIs that will align their efforts towards common objectives.

Bridging Sales And Marketing: A Blueprint For Collaboration

To help foster collaboration, evaluate your company as a whole and identify which processes, structures and in some cases even software may be stumbling blocks. Cross-train teams on the different roles, responsibilities and objectives of the two departments. The more immersive the learning can be, the better. Create spaces to foster knowledge transfer and sharing of insights, and pair up sales and marketing team members together to create deeper relationships. Each team needs an in-depth understanding of the buyer persona and the journey they take from stranger to advocate. Lastly, create common KPIs, designed to drive collaboration that both the departments can work towards.

While it may seem hard to quantitatively measure the results of these efforts initially, the long term gains are evident. Collaboration generates better quality leads, which ultimately leads to a swifter deal cycle, and a higher close rate. So get these two teams working together and supercharge your business!