Sales and marketing coordination meetings can improve both marketing and sales efforts. Read on for tips on making your meetings successful.
We’ve been talking all month about the need for health care B2B sales and marketing professionals to combine their efforts for greater success. I appreciate all the people who have commented on LinkedIn and via email. I want to cap off the month by offering some tips for marketing folks as they conduct regular meetings with their sales colleagues.
In my last post, I mentioned that a key component of working with my sales reps was a bi-weekly meeting. Depending on your situation, a bi-weekly meeting may seem like too often, or it may not seem often enough. Whatever timing works well for you and your sales peer, make sure that the meetings are scheduled and that they happen.
Talk about marketing activities: Your lead generation campaigns should be the first item on the agenda. Share every point in the planning process. If you’re in the strategy phase, share your messaging with sales and get their feedback. They talk with your audience everyday and often have insight into messaging that you may not have considered.
If you’re in the development phase, share your timelines, warts and all. Let them know when to expect the campaign to run. If you’re in the launch/flight phase, share successes, talk about hot leads, ask for progress reports on leads that you’ve sent over. That final point—progress reports on leads—is critical. Just as we need to be accountable to sales for developing leads, sales needs to be accountable to marketing for working the leads. It’s not enough to run reports from your sales automation tool; be consistent about asking sales to account for your leads.
Lead generation is likely not the only sort of campaign your working on, so be sure to give your sales lead a full update on your lead nurturing programs, your social media activities, your advertising campaigns, your traditional media outreach and your sales support efforts. All this will help sales to understand how you’re influencing the marketplace.
Talk about sales activities: Some of this will automatically happen as you discuss marketing generated leads. But you should also talk about the “big fish” that the sales team is trying to land. Talk about wins (how to replicate them) and losses (what went wrong). Talk about how individual sales territories are performing, about how marketing may be able to help in under-performing areas. Talk about prospect feedback and concerns. You can use all this information as you develop strategy and messaging.
Talk about issues: Sales and marketing, as we’ve discussed previously, often share an underlying animosity. To make sure that animosity doesn’t simmer into full-blown hatred, discuss any and all concerns during this regular meeting. Take on the role of a problem solver, but be sure to listen, and make sure your colleague knows she’s being heard.
When marketing is supporting sales efforts—by providing leads, nurturing contacts, influencing the marketplace—sales works better. The converse is true: when sales supports marketing—by providing feedback, first-hand market intelligence, and customer insight—marketing works better. It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle: it’s a successful cycle. And you can help keep this cycle moving by holding regular sales and marketing coordination meetings.
