Why Sales and Marketing Need to Work Together? Some things are just meant to be together. Peanut butter and jam. Ross and Rachel. Alcohol and bad decisions. Believe it or not, sales and marketing work a lot better when working closely as opposed to independently. One needs the other to succeed and overall, your business benefits greatly when both teams are aligned and working on the same page.
#1 Qualified Leads
Your marketing and sales teams wasting their energy, time and leads on unqualified leads is never going to end well. Marketing will blame sales for not using the right materials or approaching poor leads too quickly, while sales will be claiming that the marketing content isn’t good enough in the first place.
When your sales and marketing teams are aligned and in regular communication, information can be flown freely from department to department. Your sales team can tell the marketing team what is and isn’t working so that the marketers can adjust strategies based on what they’ve been told.
If both teams also implement the lead scoring method – with software that allows them to do it – it means they can both focus on only targeting the best-qualified leads and not wasting time on the bad ones.
Sales and marketing are two separate departments. Does it make sense to combine them?
The purpose of marketing is to drive more qualified leads, and on top of that, more leads that will turn into sales. So, if the sales team — and their unique perspective — is not part of the conversation, that’s a pretty big missing piece from the equation. If something is “just a marketing initiative,” then it often stays in a silo and is viewed as a marketing project as opposed to a business-wide initiative.
The most successful engagements are ones that everybody contributes to, has a stake in, and is actively contributing to.
#2 Better Engagement and Stronger Relationships
The more both teams communicate, the stronger their work and personal relationships will become so they’ll eventually learn to trust each other. Rather than focusing on separate activities, implementing one shared vision and goal means they can rely on each other to hit their targets.
Working together means campaigns can be more impactful, leads can be handled a lot better and potential buyers are more impressed. It shows that sales and marketing actually work a lot better when they’re together and not entirely focusing on their own specific goals.
#3 Accurate Buyer Personas
Sales and marketing teams are responsible for attracting, nurturing, delighting and closing deals in inbound marketing. That means both teams need to be on the same page for added success. Teams that aren’t on the same page and don’t communicate effectively find that the buyer personas don’t match up to the audience they’re targeting.
A huge benefit of sales and marketing working together means that marketing can help generate content that will capture the audience the sales team are chasing. By understanding customers better and having accurate buyer personas, both sales and marketing will have shared ownership and can help deliver a better and smoother buying experience.
#4 Better and Clearer Feedback
By having constant communication between sales and marketing, unifying them means a strong relationship is established. This can then lead to open lines of communication which creates a better opportunity to effectively refine strategies down the line.
By having that communication and trust between both means, they’ll both be more comfortable when asking the other team to make adjustments. For example, it could be the sales team asking the marketing team to adjust the criteria for quality leads.
By having clear and better feedback channels between sales and marketing, both teams become more receptive, they’ll focus on their shared goals. And most importantly, those Christmas parties won’t be awkward because they’ll actually begin to like about each other.
#5 Stay Ahead of the Competition
A lot of marketing teams take time out to analyze what the competition is doing, from website changes to blog posts so they know what the trends are and where they stand in comparison.
By working together, your marketing team can keep your sales team informed of the tactics being used and the positioning of the competition. This allows your sales team to properly address why your products or services are far superior to the competition when they speak to prospects.
# 6 Increased Revenue
Business owners and decision-makers care about revenue. They don’t care about traffic. They don’t care about leads. They care about sales.
So, if salespeople are in the room, they can help guide the conversation around the type of things they see in their day to day. They know what they need to help bring their prospects along.
HubSpot has reported that misalignment between both sales and marketing teams costs a staggering $1 trillion a year. That’s primarily down to 79 percent of leads never converting into sales because of a lack of nurturing. Of the leads that do get passed to sales teams, though, 73 percent of them are never contacted.
At the same time, HubSpot has also found that organisations with excellent sales and marketing alignment close 38 percent more deals and achieve 27 percent faster three-year profit growth. They also achieve 208 percent higher revenue than organisations with disconnected marketing and sales teams.
#7 Better Marketing Materials
Your sales team will receive a lot of the same questions over and over again from prospects right through to customers. When your sales team communicates this to your marketing team, it gives them a chance to actually create valuable content to inform the target audience.
This can be anything from blog posts to an eBook. Your sales team can then use these impactful marketing materials to save a lot of time while prospects will use them to make better decisions.
What determines a successful engagement with an inbound agency?
This is business and so it comes down to increased revenue. If not that, then what are the metrics that get you towards that? What are the KPIs? It can’t be just traffic.
Most people who have worked with an agency, have their traffic go way up, but their lead quality was terrible. And, that was just a waste of time and money for everybody. So, the idea is, traffic is not good, unless it brings you qualified leads, and the best way to get qualified leads, is to have input from your sales team at the beginning of the process.
At the end of the day, it’s a business philosophy about trust and about transparency. Saying it’s just the marketing team’s responsibility, or even just the sales team’s responsibility, is not accurate.
Everybody has a part to play in this. And that’s a big part of the reason why the sales team needs to be involved in these crucial marketing-related conversations.
It’s not just a sales initiative and it’s not just a marketing play, it’s a business philosophy.
