Chances are you can relate. You are driving along and you feel the car pull slightly to one side or you detect a faint shimmy in the steering wheel. No big deal, right? The thing is, left unchecked, that pull or shimmy can get progressively worse and end up resulting in costly repairs that could have been avoided altogether. A simple analogy to illustrate a long-standing challenge between sales and marketing teams – namely alignment, or perhaps more accurately, misalignment.
We’ve all witnessed the traditional sales and marketing divide – two departments with distinctly different roles. Typically, sales and marketing have different KPIs and areas of focus – marketing at the top of the sales funnel, sales at the bottom. Sales may be all about closing deals, while for marketing it’s about website traffic and generating leads. Fundamentally, each role complements the other, however there are a few telltale signs that your teams’ ‘wheels’ might be out of alignment:
What are the signs?
- For the most part, your sales and marketing teams operate independently (did someone say silo?)
- Marketing creates content that the sales team doesn’t use.
- Sales either spends time disqualifying, complaining about or ignoring ‘low quality’ marketing-generated leads.
- A number of leads go nowhere because sales doesn’t follow up or nurture them.
Sound familiar? If so, you might be wondering how to get both teams on the same page so all their work would be less likely to go to waste.
Metaphorically speaking, sales and marketing are riding in the same car, heading in the same direction – revenue growth. Unfortunately, misalignment between the two disciplines happens all too often and at a cost to companies that compounds over time. There are many sobering stats out there that put a number on this misalignment. In the US alone, LinkedIn estimates that marketing and sales waste $1 trillion dollars per year due to a lack of coordination! So where do things go awry?
Aligning Your Teams
While the digital age has brought incredible advances in marketing and sales tools, helping these teams to align and work more closely together can be a complex, even daunting challenge. We have distilled a handful of tips you can implement today to get rolling towards a tighter, more cohesive sales and marketing approach:
- Break down those silos – Quite literally, treat the two teams as one by creating a generic sales/marketing email alias (‘smarketing’ perhaps) to send and receive information pertinent to both teams. The result? Not only will this promote increased communication and information transparency across the teams but having one unified identity may be the sub-conscious boost that helps get teams to break down the silo mentality.
- Stay connected – It sounds obvious but setting up and attending regular touch-base meetings (in person or virtually) is a simple yet effective way to foster connections between sales and marketing. The result? Whether it be sales meetings, one-on-ones, conferences, or even happy hours (remember those?), the personal connections and collaboration that come from spending time together pays handsomely in terms of understanding and alignment.
- Collect and share ideas – We all know much of the ‘magic’ happens when sales interact with and connect with customers. Ideas are exchanged, feedback is given, comments are made, and marketing can’t always be there to hear first-hand. Those little gems of customer insight are invaluable in creating content that is more likely to resonate with your customers. So, set up a simple system to capture them! Have weekly 10-minute mini-brainstorm sessions with sales and marketing to get sales’ input on what content they would like to share next with their customers. The result? Marketing receives more complete and accurate customer data so they can focus their efforts to align more closely with what sales needs and customers want.
- Make sales the star – No doubt your sales team has vast experience and knowledge. Showcase it! Give them a ‘voice’ on social media by having them share company content. Marketing can draft up a handful of intro captions that sales can ‘borrow’ for their re-posts. Tap into their unique expertise in a particular area and use it as inspiration for an article, whitepaper, or case study that they can then share under their name. The result? A win-win – the salesperson builds credibility, while increasing the company’s visibility – music to marketing’s ears.
Creating unity between sales and marketing takes time and effort, but paves the way to better understanding your prospects, which in turn informs your company’s content and outreach in ways that both boost awareness and better resonate with clients. When the marketing and sales ‘wheels’ line up properly, your drive is smooth – sales cycles grow shorter, conversion rates and forecast accuracy improve and most importantly, revenues go up. And who doesn’t want that kind of smooth ride?
Looking for marketing and sales teams that can integrate this way with your existing teams…or to launch a sales and/or marketing team to grow your revenue? Channel Methods has over a decade of expertise in fully and seamlessly integrating with our clients for a holistic team approach to driving your sales and market presence. Contact us to learn more. jillians@channelmethods.com
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