5 No-Nonsense Ways to Improve the Relationship Between Marketing and Sales
Cross-collaboration between marketing and sales teams is a hot topic on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, but how much progress is being made in this area?
Marketing and sales share a common goal: to attract and convert more leads into lasting customers. However, the challenge of achieving true collaboration often comes from several factors:
- Marketing and sales departments frequently operate in isolation, with minimal communication.
- The marketing team is tasked with creating and modifying the brand’s assets, often without input from the sales team.
- Sales teams are under pressure to increase conversions, yet they might not receive high-quality marketing leads.
Enhancing collaboration, even in small steps, can benefit both departments. These include potentially increased revenue, better team morale, and shorter sales cycles. This article will present five practical tips to foster better cooperation between your marketing and sales teams, aiming for tangible organizational results.
1. Don’t Keep Your Insights Within Your Department
For sales: If you’re reviewing prospect call recordings, taking notes in your CRM, writing briefs for account managers, or all of the above, that’s qualitative data you could share with marketing.
Marketers don’t talk with prospective customers in the same ways you do, so real-life transcripts and examples will improve their content and positioning.
For marketing: Share valuable insights and data with your coworkers in the sales department. For example, you can see which web pages are converting more, what your audience is saying about your brand on social media, your brand’s organic visibility on Google, and where people are clicking through.
Don’t withhold this information. This could help your sales team close faster or shift their focus/strategy.
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2. Keep Your Messaging Consistent
Consistency in your messaging between teams is key. Leads should be able to read your messaging on your website and social channels, and the same messaging should be reiterated as they move down the sales pipeline.
If there’s a cross-up between what marketing is saying versus what sales are telling prospects, that can create frustration and confusion. If this continues, you’re looking at more and more lost deals.
Consistent messaging helps manage customer expectations. No one wants to be told one thing only to get another, especially regarding something serious like promos or pricing information.
By sticking to the same messaging, your customers will feel more confident in their understanding of your product and the benefits it could bring them.
How to Improve Messaging Alignment
Below are a few quick bullet points for more consistent messaging:
- Share an internal marketing newsletter with sales every week. Inform them of webpage changes, deals or promos, new landing page development, copywriting changes, and anything else that could disjoint messaging.
- Keep an ongoing knowledge base that sales can reference in their calls. For example, if a price drop on a specific product occurs, note it in the knowledge base. By using knowledge-based solutions and regularly updating information, your sales reps can do their job more quickly and efficiently.
- Start a team-wide Slack or Teams channel. While this is great for collaboration, a flood of team chatting could get hectic, so ensure there’s a channel admin to moderate activity.
3. Research Why You Closed and Why You Didn’t
Did your company’s latest campaign bring in leads, but they didn’t close because prospects misunderstood the product? Did a string of sales fall through because the website says you offer a key feature when, in fact, you don’t? Time to take notes.
Taking notes on why you closed deals and why you didn’t will provide valuable insights for both teams and make clear where the issues are. These notes will let the marketing team know how to adjust their efforts, messaging, and targeting. They’ll also let your sales team know about the latest information to reference in their calls.
4. Vocalize Which Content is Helpful
Today's consumers are increasingly savvy and often conduct thorough online research before engaging with a brand. Recent findings reveal that a staggering 95 percent of customers read online reviews before making a purchase. Moreover, a significant 58 percent of consumers are willing to pay a premium for products from brands with positive reviews.
This trend highlights the importance of various content formats in influencing consumer decisions. While traditional blog posts remain influential, the impact of customer reviews is paramount, with most buyers referring to them during their shopping journey.
Other impactful content types include case studies, webinars, podcasts, videos, and interactive elements like quizzes. This evolving landscape underscores the growing significance of online reviews in shaping brand perception and customer purchasing choices.
With marketing knee-deep in creating content, sales could help them with input from prospects and customers. For example, “We could use some more customer case studies; they’re a hit when pitching to IT Directors.” Marketing has data to work with, but input from sales is always valuable when creating content.
Another solution to this would be for marketers to start listening in on sales call recordings. This can be achieved easily using a business phone system or CRM with built-in call recording features. Marketers can take notes from calls, point out advantages and pain points, and even see where sales call scripts can be improved. This is the type of collaboration that sales can directly benefit from.
5. Ask Customers for Feedback
The relationship with your customers doesn’t end after the sale. Whether it’s marketing, sales, or customer success, don’t hesitate to check-in and ask for feedback.
Any method will work for surveying your customers online, in person, or over the phone.
Online: Wider and more efficient survey reach at the expense of personal interaction.
In-person: Personal interaction but limited reach.
Telephone: Hear the customer’s voice with moderate reach.
When asking for feedback, some questions to reference may include:
- Where did you first discover us?
- How would you describe your buying experience?
- What’s the one thing our website is missing?
- What’s a major concern you have about our product or service moving forward?
- Do you feel our product or service is worth the cost?
- What would make you a longtime customer?
Asking more specific questions can unveil some really insightful information. Using marketing analytics tools to analyze how customers interact with your website or app can help you discover certain behavior trends and inform the questions you need to ask them.
For example: If you see that most of your customers sign up but do not engage with your service on the first day you might ask them “What is preventing you from using our service immediately after you sign up?”
Don’t just rely on quantitative data like NPS or CSAT metrics. The more information, the more it helps marketing and sales understand customers at a deeper level. It also improves the strategy moving forward.
It’s Time to Stop Shying Away from Collaboration
Marketing and sales can make each other’s lives easier. Good marketing properly educates prospective customers about the product and its benefits before and during the sales cycle. Salespeople benefit from talking to prospects daily and listening to their pain points and feedback.
The qualitative and quantitative data collected from the sales process is precious and, if shared, can be used to create more robust, more targeted marketing materials. That’s a win-win for both teams.
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