3 Ways Marketing Can Work More Effectively with Sales

Many companies have a combined “sales and marketing” department but, often, both arms of the department have difficulty joining forces to work effectively together. The reasons why marketing and sales typically don’t work as well together vary but it often boils down to “good on paper” vs. “real-life customers.” Marketing teams tend to look at customer segments and data while sales teams tend to think more in terms of individual customers and actual product orders. Sales thinks marketing has a head-in-the-clouds perspective and marketing thinks sales is too pigheaded to listen to suggestions.

In reality, both teams are working toward the same goal: driving company revenues up. It makes sense that both teams need to find a way to work more effectively together to harness the strengths of each department arm.

Here are three ways marketing can make efforts to work more effectively with the sales team.

1. Be transparent. Make your goals known to the sales team. Then, sit down with the sales team and show how the path you’re taking is going to achieve those goals. Show the sales team how you use the data you gather to better understand and ultimately engage more effectively with your customer base. And you can prove to them, like The Guardian did in this article by Maeve Hosea in Marketing Week Magazine, that behaviors, transactions, attitudes and demographic data can really pinpoint what people are interested in buying and how they respond to your company communication.

2. Do your thing well. Pay attention to when in the marketing cycle a lead is truly qualified and be sure that you engage with the sales team to ensure that they are buying into the established sales process. Follow up. Then follow up again if you have to. But don’t ever be the reason a lead gets lost in the pipeline.

3. If the sales team is telling you that a particular piece of content is ineffective or an ad campaign isn’t working or a call to action is giving them poor leads, listen. Yes, we know your work is impeccable, but you have to sometimes put your own marketing ego aside and listen to what the boots on the ground are telling you. See if the data backs up their criticisms. If it DOES, you have a reason to change the piece. If it doesn’t, then maybe you can work with the sales team member to better understand why he or she doesn’t agree with the tactic.

If you keep in mind that you’re both truly working toward the same goal, keep an open mind and continue to communicate effectively with the sales team, then you will certainly make some headway into improving the relationship. Hopefully, by employing a few simple tactics, you can start working together less as adversaries and more as a cohesive team.