Improving Collaboration between Sales & Marketing – Part One
However good the product or service might be or however good the team is, the performance of any business is measured by the number of customers it gains and the revenue it generates. While closing the deal and bringing home the customer is the responsibility of Sales, it is Marketing that raises awareness about the product and brings the customer in contact with sales in the first place. It must be apparent from the above that sales and marketing need one another if business is going to thrive. The sales team needs the marketing team to bring them leads and the marketing team needs sales to close the leads.
So, naturally one expects sales and marketing to work together closely. While this is true in theory, unfortunately, in practice, that is not so true. In many organizations, both these teams work in silos and don’t communicate much with one another. Worse, they sometimes undermine one another and continuously bicker. Sales blames marketing for lack of leads or quality leads and marketing blames sales for not closing the leads that they bring them. At the end of the day, business suffers.
So, the obvious conclusion is to create an atmosphere where they trust one another and make them work closely together. How do we do this? How do we create this atmosphere of collaboration? Here’s how:
Crafting the message together: Salespeople are natural talkers. They love nothing more than talking about what people do and what people should do. Also, they have a customer-facing role; they perhaps know more about the demographics and buying patterns of customers more than anyone else. Make your marketing team tap into this knowledge by bringing sales and marketing together while crafting the product or service’s message. Salespeople will know the kind of message the customer will be attracted to and what they want to hear from the company. Make them a part of the decision-making process and ensure that this knowledge and insights do not go to waste.
We’ll see more in the next part.
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