It's no surprise that sales and marketing teams in most organizations seem to blame each other for not contributing enough. For instance, the marketing team may complain that the sales team is not leveraging the wealth of lead nurturing materials while the sales team may complain that the marketing team is not giving them enough good quality content, research, or leads. While there is no denying the fact that both need to work together but they rarely see eye to eye.
One of the biggest reasons why marketing and sales teams are often at loggerheads is because the marketer is like a war general who creates the attack strategy (marketing) while the sales team is more like a soldier going into the battle.
While marketers generally think in terms of audiences, segments, long-term projects, and tendencies; salespeople generally think about individual buyers, individual buyers, real-life situations, and relationships. To sum up, there is no surprise about the reasons for possible friction in the friendship between marketing “thinkers” and sales “practitioners”.
Tightly-aligned marketing and sales teams help businesses:
become 67% better at closing deals,
increase sales win rates by 38%,
achieve 24% faster three-year revenue growth,
achieve 27% faster three-year profit growth.
However, the reality is quite different as the two teams rarely communicate or don't communicate fairly.
So, what can be done to strike a possible and rewarding friendship between sales and marketing? Just like marriage, friendship is hard work and the only reason when both teams would perform harmoniously is when they know it’s going to benefit them.
Nothing unites people better than a common task, especially the ones that can be measured. You can encourage your sales and marketing teams to jointly formulate a new sales and marketing strategy, draft a yearly territory plan, and map out the entire lead management process. Each team's real-life anecdotes, everyday knowledge, expertise, and hands-on experience will benefit the other and they can then see their functions in a different light.
Secondly, both teams can share a number of metrics such as sales cycle length, average deal size, pipeline (value of qualified opportunities), average revenue per account, number of products/modules in each deal, and social media reach, engagement, and followers.
It is often seen that sales and marketing like to point fingers at each other when results are disappointing or things go horribly wrong. Therefore, it does make sense to put an end to the never-ending annoying “blame game”. However, things are not as easy as they appear in the first place.
While the performance of the sales team is visible most of the time, the performance of the marketing team is often difficult to evaluate over a period of time as they are involved in rather complex, multi-step, and long-term projects. But, alignment is indeed possible with the sales team sharing their data such as the number of closed and lost sales and the actual revenue and the marketing team sharing their data such as page views, marketing and sales qualified leads (MQLs and SQLs), marketing ROI, click-through-rates, and customer engagement and acquisition rates so both teams know how hard each team has been working.
To put an end to the “them vs. us” mentality, it's important to remove every barrier that separates sales and marketing so they can contribute to and support each other in their individual and collective goals.
Find out how you can bring sales and marketing teams together and make them start liking and respecting each other. Call or email us at C.I.G Consultants now.
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