Have you ever had a best friend you felt so in-sync with, to the point where you finished each other’s sentences or talked in unison? Just like a best friend, marketers and salespeople are realising the need to foster a strong, symbiotic relationship in order to work in tandem and eliminate unnecessary guesswork.
Contrarily, best friends often get into fights or disagreements. They point fingers and blame one another, only to later realise they wanted the same thing all along. They just weren’t communicating properly. All too often, marketing and sales teams work separately and miscommunicate. As a result, the company ends up losing out on important lead-conversions, and even worse, are left with unhappy or fed up customers.
In fact, misalignment between your sales and marketing could be losing you 10% in annual revenue.
Each party thinks it’s the other’s fault. In fact, misalignment between B2B sales and marketing costs companies an annual 10% or more loss in revenue. This obviously won’t do. Companies are quickly learning to mend these fractures between departments because it's bad for business.
More recently, efforts are being made to fuse objectives and increase collaboration between the marketing and sales teams.
Three Opportunities for Your Marketing and Sales to Work Together
1. It’s All About the Customer Experience
It is typically said that marketers do not communicate individually with customers. Rather, they analyse demographic trends to attract a large quantity of leads and increase awareness of a brand. Salespeople, on the other hand, target individuals on accounts and take a more “frontline” approach. With the rise of account-based marketing , however, marketers are adopting a more personalised approach toward lead-generation, thereby necessitating even more coordination with sales.
The key is to foster audience alignment, but how?
Both sales and marketing run separate automated systems that store data on customers and prospects. Integrating these systems (i.e., CRM) helps marketers to more effectively pass leads onto sales.
This is an important step, but still doesn’t create a shared vision on customer experience. A holistic and communicative process is of utmost importance to link the ‘customer journey’ from start to finish. Several models exist that identify stages of the customer’s buying process, for example: Awareness-Engage-Attract-Convert. Marketing and Sales must work together to define who is responsible for what stage and develop strategy that best works for the company, and for the customers.
2. Data Sharing and Analysis
Consistently tracking and reviewing data is helpful in both sales and marketing. Imagine a world where both departments shared valuable knowledge for the purpose of helping each other and optimising common goals.
Both the marketing and sales departments can help each other acquire and analyse data that helps increase the lead-to-sales closing rate, and cultivates better understanding of the customer journey.
First, marketers should be passing on contact touches, or: a record of what interaction a lead has already had with the company. This might include email campaign conversion, online offer interactions, chatbot inquiries and more.
Sales then needs to keep the momentum going by equally documenting all interactions made once the lead has been passed on. Identifying how many interactions were made in marketing, and what they were, can help both entities identify what makes a sales-qualified lead.
Second, the sales department needs to report back to the marketing team about how many leads they are engaging with, how many are in progress and how many were dropped. This will help marketers gauge if they are generating quality leads that are actually intending to close, or if their marketing strategies need to be adjusted in order to attract prospects that will indeed follow through.
3. Optimisation and Improved Productivity
Without proper cooperation between marketing and sales, companies end up losing revenue and time. Conversely, when both departments develop shared goals and work together, the whole process from start to finish is optimised and ultimately creates a flywheel effect. As the joint-team engage in the buying cycle for the first time, they will collect crucial knowledge and build momentum that is carried forth to the next cycle, making the wheel spin faster and faster.
(Source: LinkedIn)
With all that shared data, both entities will better know the kind of companies that respond, and build a plan that engages with buyer cycles with nuance and commitment. Each time the cycle starts anew, both sales and marketing will observe higher levels of productivity, motivating them to further share knowledge and ultimately benefiting the company at large.
Final Thoughts
We can all agree that it's better to be friends than foes with the people you work with. In a rapidly developing industry, customers are becoming more savvy about the companies they want to close with, and marketers and salespeople need to up their game to see success.
Luckily, working together is proving to be an effective way of improving business. By concentrating on some key strategies of collaboration, the benefits will soon outweigh any initial hesitancy to work together. Now is truly the moment for sales and marketing to become best friends.