By Guest Contributor Vince Guerra, President and Founder | Guerra Strategy
The conflicts between sales and marketing are legendary. Marketing doesn’t feel like it gets enough credit for its contribution to the sales process, while sales is still asking, “Does all this marketing stuff even work?”
While both sales and marketing are focused on generating revenue for the company, they go about it from two vastly different perspectives. After all, you rarely hear a salesperson getting excited about social media and big data, and you never see a marketing manager full of adrenaline after closing a big contract.
Ideally, sales and marketing should work toward agreed-upon goals and complement what the other is doing. If they are disconnected from each other, then new business, client retention, and ultimately revenue will suffer. So how can sales and marketing start playing nice together?
Here are a few steps you can take towards sales and marketing alignment.
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Aim at the same target
While marketing has all the demographic data on your best clients, sales can tell you their names, what they look like, where they went to college, what car they drive, and why they even come to work. Working together to create a detailed buyer persona is the most important starting point for sales and marketing alignment. If they agree on the characteristics of your target clients, then marketing will generate more new prospects who will look a lot like the clients sales is already closing.
Sales, go with marketing
And marketing, go with sales. Football fans love to second-guess a coach’s decision or a quarterback’s mental capacity. It’s no different with sales and marketing. Marketing feels that closing ratios are too low considering all the high-quality leads they are delivering to sales. Sales wonders if marketing knows the difference between an interested suspect and a qualified prospect. By working in each other’s role for a few days, sales and marketing learn exactly how difficult it is to walk in the other person’s shoes.
Sales can jump in on a lead-generation or retention campaign and see the details that are involved with tracking budgets, managing vendors and constructing a compelling offer, while writing attention-grabbing copy. Marketing can no longer hide behind email when they have to pick up the phone and call all those fantastic leads they’ve been handing to sales.
Identify where sales and marketing overlap
Typically, marketing owns the top of the funnel while sales owns the bottom. However, those warm prospects in the middle of the funnel make a great place for sales and marketing to work together.
For the next piece of content your company creates (blog posts, ebooks, videos, etc.), have a salesperson describe the characteristics of the last major sale that he or she closed to the appropriate marketing personnel. Marketing should put on their journalist hat and thoroughly interview the salesperson. He or she should ask the salesperson questions in order to learn why the company’s product was a good fit in that specific situation and how the customer benefited from purchasing the product. Suddenly, sales will actually care about the final content and get excited about discussing it with their prospects and clients.
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As you can see, aligning sales and marketing can be simple to implement, and the benefits are definitely worth it. Integrating sales and marketing allows you to achieve greater results from the two areas that most affect your company’s revenue. Plus, annual planning and goal-setting will become more about working together to achieve the overall goals of the business rather than each department operating in a vacuum.
Your customers will benefit, too. Aligning sales and marketing improves customer feedback, which allows their needs to be communicated quickly throughout the organization, resulting in timelier product enhancements and increased client retention.
