Strawberries and cream. Bread and butter. Bangers and mash. Some things just go better together. And the same is true of your sales and marketing teams.
Today, there’s no room for silos. You need these two working side by side, because they’re so much more than the sum of their parts. Effectively aligning your sales and marketing teams stands to deliver better results for you and your customers.
Start with the numbers
We’ve cherrypicked some stats to highlight the clear benefits of combining the efforts of your sales and marketing teams. If these don’t convince you to act, what will?
Want even more cold, hard evidence? Simply click here.
Examples of how they can help each other
Generating more qualified leads, strengthening customer relationships, creating better marketing materials. There’s no shortage of ways that sales and marketing can win together. Let’s explore a handful in a more detail.
Understand customers better Sales are constantly talking to customers, giving them a window into their needs and any possible objections. These insights are invaluable and hard to access otherwise. This allows marketing to develop messaging that speaks directly to customers’ pain points and explains how your business can alleviate them.
Nurture cold leads Warm leads are easier to convert and therefore more appealing to sales. But there’s still value in nurturing those more reluctant leads that take additional time and effort. By putting a tailored nurture campaign in place, marketing can help ensure cold leads don’t slip away to be snapped up by competitors and more conversions can be made.
Share marketing feedback It’s not always easy for marketing to gauge how well their outputs are being received. Sales’ direct line to customers means they can pass on their feedback – where they’re seeing marketing messages, whether they’re resonating and if they’re using the right channels to deploy them – then marketing can use this to adapt comms accordingly.
How to put this into practice?
Aligning your sales and marketing teams takes time and different approaches will work for different businesses. But there are a few things you can implement straightaway to get the ball rolling in the right direction.
If you work in sales…
1. Get someone from marketing along to your weekly sales meeting.
2. Share details of customer conversations you’re having. For instance:
What are the most common questions you get about the website?
What do you find yourselves repeating on first calls, in meetings or follow-ups?
Are the three foundational brand questions answered before you chat with a qualified lead? (Who are we? What do we do? How do we do it?)
3. Empower marketing to use that vital intel for updating the company’s website, collateral, social media and advertising.
If you work in marketing…
Invite someone from sales into your weekly marketing status meeting.
Ask sales to help review your marketing personas to ensure they’re up to date and closely aligned with who you’re trying to target.
Give sales the inside scoop on the sorts of marketing tactics you’re using and the brand messaging you’ve got planned.
Empower the sales team to use new, targeted branded assets for quicker closes by making it clear how they can use these messages to elevate their selling and explain how they can be modified for ABM purposes.
As a side note, it could also be very worthwhile quizzing your sales team on whether they have any strategic partnerships you could leverage for brand storytelling.
If you need a hand turning sales insights, customer feedback and strategic partnerships that win you business? We’re something of a dab hand at this, so get in touch today.
Featured image by Jason Goodman on Unsplash.