Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams BFFs?
As an agency, we know that in order to do our best work we need to be speaking with our clients’ marketing, sales and executive teams on a regular basis.
If we don’t, we run the risk of missing out on the full picture on everything from business needs, customer requirements, key personas to overall results.
When we have these conversations we often realise that sales, marketing and the executive teams are not all on the same page. Sometimes they are not even having the same conversation.
We remain stunned by the number of otherwise smart companies who allow their sales and marketing teams to exist in separate silos. It makes no sense.
A failure to work well together will cost you
According to the Harvard Business Review “when Sales and Marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.”
Keep them apart and you’ll not only lose the above, but you’ll also give people in both teams the ability to blame the other for poor performance. You’ll find it hard to ever know where the real problem exists.
During good times small cracks could be papered over through targets being met. These are not good times we’re having right now. The reality is that cracks will appear (they probably already have), the blame game will start and your business will suffer. Front foot this now.
Finger-pointing won’t solve your problems (even when it’s right)
If you’ve ever worked with a sales person you would have heard them point to the quality of leads as the reason for them missing their sales targets. Just as you’d have heard a marketer say that revenue is down because the sales team aren’t making their calls or doing their job properly.
If you have completely separate sales and marketing teams in your business then you are encouraging an Us and Them culture. There is not a single reason this is a good idea. This should never be acceptable in any company. But in the current climate, and the one to come during the recovery, it will severely limit your ability to make the changes needed to grab market share.
Some simple solutions
All is not lost though. Here are some simple and highly effective changes you can make to get your teams pulling in the same direction starting today.
- Arrange recurring (not just one-off) meetings that include both teams. These meetings should plan upcoming periods, set goals and then review and analyse the results of previous periods. There is nowhere to hide and no way to point fingers if everyone’s in it together.
- Have both teams work on creating a content calendar together. Their different perspectives will be invaluable.
- Have them analyse and agree on the customer journey together.
- Have them develop buyer personas together.
- Share marketing, sales and customer feedback in real-time with both teams.
- Have them sit together where possible.
- Have both teams celebrate the victories of the other team.
- Have them collectively own relevant metrics across both sales and marketing.
- Most importantly, when there are problems or challenges, have both teams work together to identify the issue and work out how to solve it.
Next Steps
If you’d like to take things to the next level, you might also be interested in learning more about our sales enablement services. This is where we work with clients to build highly effective sales processes and CRMs to ensure that whether you are in sales, marketing or the executive team you’ll have complete transparency about each and every opportunity that comes into the business and what happens to it along the way.
We’ve got a lot of experience bringing sales and marketing teams together. If you’d like to have a chat about what we think works best, then let’s talk.
David Lawrence is the MD and Co-Founder of Rocket, an award-winning Australian digital marketing agency. He is also the co-author of the Amazon #1 best-selling marketing book 'Smarter Marketer'. David has presented at several events including Inbound, Search Marketing Summit, Mumbrella360, CEO Institute and a variety of seminars and in-house sessions.
David has built his expertise from a diverse career, starting with an economics degree before jumping into all things web in the late 90s.
Today, David is Rocket's Managing Director and is known for his ability to find clarity in the bigger picture. He is highly respected as a digital marketing authority, sharing his expertise with an extensive network here in Australia and around the world.
