The Importance of Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing

Unlock the true potential of your sales force by leveraging marketing in innovative ways that go beyond lead generation.

• Maximize Marketing's Strategic Impact on Sales: Much, if not most, marketing is focused on the company and their solutions. Despite the fact that this strategy is often an attempt to differentiate, it ensures that the company looks like an identical twin, if not a triplet, with its competitors. The first change to help the sales force is to market the strategic outcomes the prospective clients need. By focusing on the strategic outcome, you are helping your sales force to focus on the results your clients need. The alignment with the sales force will cause the sales force to have a better conversation with their client, as buyers and decision-makers are interested in the most important outcomes.
• Understand Industry and Company Profiles for Better Sales Alignment: Marketing can build the profile, starting with a dossier on the client’s industry. In some surveys, buyers and decision-makers complain that the salesperson knows too little about the client’s industry. Marketing can also improve your understanding of what companies need based on their size and maturity. A start-up is different from an enterprise-level company. The alignment here will help the salesperson know enough to address issues related to the industry and growth stage of any company they call on.
• Create Detailed Client Avatars to Drive Sales Success: Some marketing companies create an avatar of their client, with a composite of age, gender, income level, and education. While this information allows marketing to find a picture they can use in the content they create for the sales force, the alignment means marketing defines the sales team’s responsibilities and how they are likely to be assessed. Any information about buying behaviors, decision-making, common problems, and motivations can be helpful for the salesperson.
• Leverage Data to Identify High-Conversion Sales Opportunities: With the data and things like intent can help the sales force to prioritize the sales force to focus on the prospective clients that are most likely to take a meeting and convert. For the last couple of decades, sales leaders have focused on sales efficiency without actually being efficient. If you are going to pay for technology, identifying high-conversion opportunities would align with the work of the sales force, helping them spend most of their time on the best possible clients.
• Align Product Development with Current Client Needs: You may have a product manager. Working with marketing can ensure that your service or product is what your clients need. Because our current environment is one of accelerating, constant disruptive change, what buyers needed in the last quarter may not help their results or their ability to take care of their customers today. Marketing can help with a new product by proving it solves the client’s problems.
• Improve Customer Retention through Strategic Marketing Alignment: Marketing can align with the sales force to identify the root cause of lost clients. By managing the data about the clients that churned, marketing can work with the customer success team to improve retention. Churn that steals net new revenue, so work hard to reduce it.
• Gaining a Competitive Edge with Comprehensive Insights: One underutilized task that marketing can provide is an assessment of the company’s competitors. Of all the topics here, this is important for the sales force. To identify these insights, marketing will need to find data through research and using the insights that the sales force logs in the CRM. This includes the reasons a client fired their partner, notes related to pricing, or anything that will allow the sales force to have a strategy that will help them to displace or win a competitive deal.
• Quarterly Sales and Marketing Alignment for Enhanced Results: When your task force comprises effective salespeople, marketing, and product managers, you can align your initiatives. Too few sales organizations do the work to identify and pursue the changes to improve sales and marketing’s results.