In my experience, there's one key ingredient to well-aligned sales and marketing teams: communication.
In my last post on the topic of sales and marketing integration, I shared some B2B marketers’ ideas for improving the relationship between sales and marketing. Among the ideas were making marketing bonuses dependent on sales goals and aligning sales and marketing under the same executive.
The ideas touched on in the post and in the LinkedIn BtoB Marketing group I pulled them from are intriguing. But what if they are impossible for you to implement? Or what if you’ve tried some of these ideas, with little success?
In my experience, there’s one key ingredient to well-aligned sales and marketing teams: communication.
One of the marketing leaders I interviewed at HFMA’s ANI, Jessica Berens of McKesson, had the same thought. When I asked her the key to helping her marketing team and her sales team work together, she answered:
Constant communication. Our sales team is really what makes marketing effective. We can get those leads generated and that message out there and those awareness campaigns going, it really takes sales to follow-up on that and make the sales happen.
So at McKesson, communication about marketing campaigns and the results of those campaigns is key. It seems marketing won’t be looked at as successful unless sales follows up and works the leads. That’s true of organizations I’ve worked with. The converse is true as well. Sales won’t be as effective without marketing’s branding, awareness and lead generation campaigns.
Another marketing leader I met at ANI, Robin Walters of Halley Consulting Group, also considered communication key:
Quick answer: Communication! In my experience, larger companies often don’t have a mechanism in place for the sales team on the ground to communicate up the chain to the marketing department. Sales reps have valuable on-the-street knowledge about trends that are affecting your business, often before the grapevine reaches marketing and management in the form of a closed sale or other data. I believe marketing planning is important; however, no matter how large your company, you should be ready to react to any changes in the market place that could affect the closure of a sale.
As a marketer, the best business relationships I’ve had with my aligned sales reps have been those where both the sales leader and I were regularly communicating, either by phone, by email or in person. We’d often talk two-to-three times per week. I’d share progress on the projects we were working on; he’d share information on the leads his team was working.
It was more than a meeting just for communication’s sake. The sales lead was able to understand the expectations that the leads I sent him had based on his knowledge of my campaign messaging. And I was able to understand how strong or weak my marketing-generated leads were, because I knew how those leads were closing.
Tell me about your experience, good or bad, with sales/marketing meetings…
Photo credit: Think Panama
