Marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin – they both serve a single purpose; to help organizations grow.
Increasingly, companies recognize the need for their marketing and sales teams to work together more closely than ever before. However, marketers often feel they wish they could say something to their counterparts in sales but don’t always have the opportunity or confidence to do so.
This post shines a light on bridging this communication gap – it’ll provide an insight into what’s going through the mind of a marketer when engaging with colleagues from sales and help salespeople better understand how to collaborate effectively with their peers from marketing.
Approaching these topics thoughtfully and openly can help you work through them and allow the sales team to see things from the marketer’s perspective.
1. “My marketing team doesn’t understand the value of the solutions you sell or the sales process well enough.”
Most marketers don’t have a sales background. While they often understand a solution’s description, marketers don’t always grasp how salespeople shape the value proposition during the sales process.
If marketers don’t understand what it takes to move from one stage to the next, they will likely be unable to provide the marketing support needed to help advance the sale.
2. “It would be great to tell me what we are doing well or what we should do differently.”
Salespeople typically don’t have a marketing background nor the perspective of precisely the kinds of marketing support they need beyond “more leads.”
However, experienced salespeople know marketing support is essential to building awareness and understanding its solutions. More than ever, marketers need sales insight into how customers and prospects consume content and spend their time keeping up with industry trends and best practices.
3. “Measuring marketing ROI is one of my top priorities, but you don’t seem to care.”
The marketer’s mission is to drive revenue and brand awareness, and often the sales teams don’t seem to understand nor appreciate the challenges that the marketing team faces to prove ROI to the leadership team.
Sales teams are vested in marketing’s success but may be in the dark about their role in helping marketing measure ROI.
Marketers’ reluctance to ask too much of salespeople when providing feedback may be considerate on the surface. The sales teams are usually willing to provide marketing feedback if their feedback is appreciated and marketing changes or improves marketing initiatives.
It’s essential to remember that marketing and sales bring something vital to the table, so they must work together.
Though there may be a few challenges along the way, ultimately, close collaboration between marketing and sales leads to better results. For this to happen, both sides need to have honest and open conversations about what works and what doesn’t, as well as how they can help one another.