Improving Collaboration between Sales & Marketing – Part Two

This is a continuation of the previous post where we touched on the importance of collaboration between an organization’s sales and marketing teams. One way to improve this collaboration is to involve the sales team in defining the marketing message and planning marketing activities. In this post, we’ll look at some other ways.

Common objectives and incentives: In most organizations, it’s the sales team which gets the shorter end of the stick. They are the ones who have well-defined targets which are directly linked to their bonuses and commissions whereas the performance of the marketing team is not strictly linked to compensation. Both have different objectives and metrics too; in the online marketing world, while marketing objectives focus on spreading awareness about the product/service and its metrics focus on page views and the average time a visitor spends on the site, sales has the objective of closing a deal and bringing in a customer and metrics like lead time and number of customers gained. To reduce this gap, therefore, organizations could look to align these objectives and institute an incentive structure where both teams are on equal terms and work towards a common goal.

Information sharing: Perhaps nothing hamstrings a sales or marketing team more than lack of information. We talked about working in silos before. The same way, in some organizations, information silos are created and not shared between departments. To achieve a truly collaborative atmosphere, organizations should do away with these silos and make the teams share real-time information with one another. A good sales and marketing automation software solution will help greatly in this cause.

Periodic meetings: Another way to improve collaboration is to institute a system of periodic meetings involving all or prominent members of both teams. A weekly or fortnightly gathering of sales and marketing teams where both teams discuss issues of the previous period and identify focus areas for the coming period will help them both realize mutual trust and collaboration.

Do you know any other ways? Please let us know.