I often hear the complaint like:
- “My marketing team doesn’t give me enough leads to fulfill my budget!”
- “Why should we generate more leads when they cant handle the ones they get?”
In many cases, a lack of dialogue is the cause of these alarming and frustrating breakdowns.
Try these 4 simple strategies for increasing communication and breaking down the walls between your sales and marketing teams.
- Develop a shared goal. What better way to encourage collaboration between salespeople and marketers than creating a shared goal? I often see businesses using separate performance indicators for each of these teams. On the broadest level, the goals should be the same: increasing revenue, onboarding new customers, and retaining the customers you have. By linking performance (and compensation) to the health of the company’s revenue stream and customer base, marketing and sales will be incentivized to collaborate early and often. Go a step further by requiring key team members from both departments to meet with executives on a monthly or quarterly basis keep the communication flowing and the combined team accountable.
- Realign focus to the customer. What do marketing and sales (and all of your other teams) have in common? The customer! By reminding your teams their number one focus should always be customer satisfaction success between teams will start to come down. Encourage a dialogue so salespeople and marketers are sharing their client feedback openly. Not only will your team begin to work together more fluidly, their ability to service the customer will grow.
- Create a collective process. Many times, sales and marketing departments will create their workflows independently without giving much thought of how they influence one another. The reality is the company’s customer acquisition process includes both teams. Encourage sales and marketing management to identify where in the process each of their internal players is involved. Map out the ideal path and encourage team members from both sides to find opportunities to work together to optimize the process. And remember the marketing part doesn’t end when the salespeople start handling the deals, the teams should work the whole way and acquire the customer together.
- Celebrate achievements together. Be sure to celebrate all of the “wins” your employees achieve together as a collective team. When attempting to unite marketing and sales departments, it can be especially helpful to find opportunities to celebrate successes collaboration and camaraderie have brought to your organization. Demonstrate the impact working together has had on the ultimate goal by calling on team members who have exemplified the definition of teamwork to show your employees you value these qualities.
With some effort and guidance, you can remind your marketing and sales teams that they are stronger working together than they could ever be independently. By uniting these two teams you will benefit from an improved, collaborative strategy, and increased revenue figures as a result!
To learn more about how you could combine marketing and sales to increase sales, look into the possibility to do real targeted marketing in the end of the sales process using GetAccept Retargeting.
