Log in or sign up with LinkedIn:
By authorizing yourself on this website, you agree to Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
In any business, marketing and sales are equally crucial departments, responsible for growing the business, and ensuring its success. While sales and marketing are fundamentally different practices, they both work towards the same goal: ensuring the success of your company.
Unfortunately, for many years, marketing and sales teams have operated in siloed environments, failing to interact with each other to guarantee better outcomes. However, research reveals that 73% of respondents believe their revenues increase when sales and marketing teams are aligned.
Sales and marketing teams have long had a somewhat complex relationship at best, but they’re designed to work better together than they do alone.
Sales teams are responsible for interacting with customers, pitching opportunities, and convincing clients to make that crucial purchasing decision. Marketing professionals are the people who build your company’s reputation, attract new customers towards the sales team, and provide sales with the scripts they need to convert leads.
Unfortunately, relationships can be difficult to build between these two teams, because marketers often blame sales professional for not doing a right job with nurturing and following up with leads. On the other hand, sales reps complain marketing teams aren’t bringing in enough quality leads to ensure successful conversions.
Overcoming this friction, and creating an integrated marketing and sales team, is how companies set themselves apart from the competition, and achieve better results.
Perhaps the most significant initial benefit of integrating marketing and sales teams, is that you get to know your customer on a deeper level. Sales teams are the people who actually communicate with clients on a day-to-day basis. When they can share their experiences with the marketing team, you can get a more detailed idea of why customers choose your brand over competitors, and what factors they look at when making a purchase.
The input of the sales team helps marketers to create more accurate, in-depth buyer personas, so marketing strategies can have a more relevant, targeted message. Likewise, sales team benefit from the marketing teams feedback on which campaigns have been the most successful, as this can help to guide sales professionals in deciding which sales strategies to use.
Other benefits of an integrated marketing and sales approach include:
Marketing and sales professionals are naturally aligned in the quest to convert customers and make sales. The difference is simply that marketing teams line the leads up for sales professionals, while sales teams do the work of closing the deal.
To ensure marketing and sales teams work together, companies need to eliminate the silos between these two groups. Both sets of employees need a way to conveniently communicate and share knowledge on a consistent basis. This could mean setting each team up with access to collaboration tools that offer access to a centralized CRM system.
Sales teams can use customer relationship management technology to track the progress of deals and make notes about their interactions with clients – helping to strengthen the company’s knowledge of its target audience. Marketing teams can use the CRM and the information submitted by the sales team to create more in-depth buyer personas for marketing purposes.
Both groups can then work together on keeping the CRM data as up-to-date and relevant as possible, so everyone in the business is making decisions based on authentic insights into the customer, and what drives purchasing actions.