When marketing and sales align, revenue grows and the pipeline moves more smoothly. Just ask the sales team at Kapost: when they get a request from a lead for more information, they send it down the line to the marketing team, who looks through their resources to see if they have any literature that addresses the lead’s needs. If they do, they send it along, and if they don’t, they create something new. The salesperson is able to quickly meet their lead’s needs and the sales cycle keeps moving.
Are you looking to see this kind of communication between your sales and marketing teams? Read on for our four best practices to align the two departments.
If you want your two departments to stay accountable to each other, developing and signing a service level agreement (SLA) is essential. In this agreement, marketing agrees to generate a certain amount of leads at a certain level of quality while sales agrees to follow up with these leads quickly and with a certain, demonstrable level of impact. Draft one of these agreements at the beginning of an integrated sales and marketing campaign, and make sure that all goals and obligations are detailed and quantifiable to avoid confusion. You can always re-evaluate and reset expectations once your campaigns get going, but having benchmarks to strive for will help both departments stay on track.
Salespeople often complain of “marketing talk”—marketing content and messaging they deem irrelevant to the customers they talk to daily. Meanwhile, marketers worry about “salesy” language pushing potential customers away. But in order to align the two departments, content and language must be aligned. Encourage your marketing team to sit in on sales calls to get a feel for the language that customers respond to as well as the wants and needs that they identify over the phone. By understanding firsthand what customers need, marketers are able to create content that the sales team can use to bolster their efforts.
One of the biggest complaints the sales department has about marketing is that they hand off leads that are uninformed or unwilling to move forward in the buying cycle. This typically happens because those leads aren’t nurtured long enough or effectively enough before they are delegated to sales. Marketing must work to understand what kind of lead information is crucial for sales and then focus on capturing the insights that set the sales team up for success before the handoff takes place.
The only way to really ensure that sales and marketing continue to flourish is to continually follow up with your counterparts in the other department and collectively evaluate performance. Set up weekly meetings in order to discuss how the two departments are working together, where you’re seeing problems, and what needs to be done to make alignment even tighter.
How are you ensuring that your department is staying aligned with sales goals, tactics and operations?
Photo Credit: Petiatil via Wikimedia Creative Commons
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