The Keys to Creating a Meaningful Sales-Marketing Partnership
In terms of cross-departmental relationships, there might not be one more interesting, easily fractured, and opposite as that of sales and marketing. It really is fascinating.
The two groups cannot do their jobs without each other (at least not sustainably at scale) and each is instrumental to the other’s success. Both are working toward the same goal, but at different ends of the spectrum. And at some point there is a handoff from marketing to sales and it’s out of one’s control and with another.
It can at times feel like a reality TV concept, or maybe The Odd Couple for those that get that reference. Can these two polar opposites survive in the same house without going crazy? Marketing feels like working with sales is like herding cats and sales doesn’t think marketing does enough on their end to make their job easier.
But it doesn’t have to always be this way. There are a couple of steps you can take to have a more aligned, fruitful sales-marketing relationship, which is only going to help your bottom line.
Use Sales as an Audience Whisperer
Most think of the dynamic as marketing feeding information and messaging to sales and sales running with said messaging. But we rarely think about it moving the other direction. If this sounds foreign to you, change it.
Marketing’s purpose is to create messaging and solutions that meet the needs of what their customers want. It’s common for marketing to rely on client and delivery teams to say what’s working and what’s not, but less often do marketers utilize their sales people as ones with a pulse on the landscape. This is a missed opportunity.
Sales is engaging with decisionmakers at critical points in their journeys. Sales is the one who is seeing what is hooking buyers’ attention and what is holding them back. Those are valuable nuggets that can help marketing pivot based on direct feedback. Is the timing off? Are external factors hurting budgets? You need to know so you don’t create wasted content.
Document Decisioning and Attribution
One of the biggest challenges for marketers is properly citing attribution. There’s only so much the majority of organizations can track, and it can be difficult to stamp in black and white where the first touchpoint came from and what pushed a buyer over the top.
Sales should be asking prospects how they found your company and what resonated with them. Similarly, if an opportunity is lost, make sure sales finds out why you were not chosen and that the information is shared with both teams. Conversion success has much better odds when you’re not making the same mistakes over and over.
On the flip side, marketers should be arming sales with as much information as they can heading into a new outreach engagement. Give your sales team all that you know: where that prospect has been engaging, what pages they’ve been on your site, how long they’ve been in the searching/consideration phase with you, etc. It will make those initial sales outreaches much more relevant and impactful.
Understand and Customize Information
We may like to generalize the stereotypical sales person, but the truth is there are quite a few different personalities and methods of operations among them. This can be tougher with larger sales teams, but marketers should do their best to know and provide what an individual sales person needs from them.
Are they a natural storyteller who just needs a few bullet points and can fill in the rest? Do they need a word-for-word script to ensure they’re articulating your products and story correctly? Do they tend to go rogue and measures need to be taken to keep them on brand? There’s a good chance all of these personalities exist within the same team. It’s marketing’s job to figure out who’s who and tailor support accordingly.
Remind, Remind, Remind
Sales people get the worst rap, but most aspects of a company struggle to retain and use what marketing gives them without some hand-holding. It can feel like a lot of a marketer’s job is to repeat themselves or ask for a status update. That’s just the nature of the job. To help, we recommend:
Centralizing documents. Don’t make your counterparts in sales or elsewhere go to five different locations to get the information or asset they need. If it’s in more than one place, there’s a good chance they won’t go to any of them.
Building in reminders. No one is going to retain what you tell them after one time. If it’s important, keep it top of mind. Use sales and marketing meetings to provide updates and remind of important assets to use. Get creative and make signs they can tape to their computer with the path to the documents they need. Whatever you do, don’t just say it once and move on. They will, too.
Proving the value. Sales people are trying to hit quotas and focus on their remit. Make sure you clearly articulate how this new asset or POV benefits them specifically and who/why they should target within their prospect lists.
I’ve been fortunate to work at several different companies where marketing and sales had great relationships and worked together relatively smoothly. And it didn’t happen by accident. We made a distinct focus to build this relationship with processes and strategies in place to benefit both sides.
The outcome is worth the effort, for both the company and your mental state.