The effectiveness of your sales and marketing teams is increased if they work together—marketers can better line up leads for the sales team, and salespeople can better dial in target markets. But what if you’re having trouble getting your marketing and sales teams to collaborate? These are themes explored in several of the enVisioning Success podcast episodes, most recently with Collaborative Campaigns: Joint Marketing and Sales Initiatives. Learn more about the four steps you should take to get your sales and marketing efforts working together.
1. Establish Communications and Point Persons
Having siloed departments might cut down on meetings, but too much separation can lead to sales and marketing initiatives that the other departments can’t capitalize on: a sales expo that isn’t promoted on social media or an email funnel that points to the wrong sales contact. Your first step needs to be building communications between these two departments, establishing points of contact to better coordinate future marketing and sales initiatives.
2. Map Out the Customer Journey Together
Once you’ve got your two teams on the same page, it’s necessary to get them to talk about both their duties in the larger context of your customer lifecycle. A great start is the customer journey, the steps that customers go through:
- Awareness: Potential customers seeing your brand (a primary goal of marketing)
- Consideration: People review your products and services (top of the sales funnel)
- Acquisition: People become customers by buying from you (and your sales team)
- Retention: An important step where sales loops back in marketing to retain the customers
- Advocacy: Getting past customers’ help with reviews, testimonials, and word-of-mouth marketing
Learn more about it (and the analytics behind it) in our blog: The Marketing Analytics Behind Your Customer Journey.
3. Start Tracking, Sharing, and Using Data
Analytics data from your website, social media platforms, apps, online profiles, and CRMs (customer relationship management software) can be vital in planning better sales and marketing. Make sure it’s not only being tracked (such as with Google Analytics for your website) but that it’s being shared with all interested parties at your business and being applied. Gathering sales data can help your business build better profiles on customers. Knowing the sources of your website’s traffic can help you track what is and isn’t working with your marketing and sales initiatives. This data will also be essential for the next step: constructive meetings between these two teams.
4. Align Strategies with Regular Meetings
Communication between your departments isn’t enough: you need to put that communication, customer tracking, and analytics data into better marketing and sale strategies. Meeting quarterly (or more or less frequently depending on the sales tempo of your business) can help you build better sales and marketing initiatives and keep everyone in the loop, from pre-qualifying sales leads to multi-channel sales and marketing strategies.
About the enVisioning Success Podcast
This article is based on topics discussed in enVisioning Success, our weekly podcast hosted by Vision CEO Laura DiBenedetto and COO Julia Becker Collins. In it, they discuss all things business and marketing, from lead generation to leadership. Find us on PodBean to download from your platform of choice, or subscribe to our mailing list to get new episodes and other news delivered directly to your inbox.
It can be hard to get your sales and marketing team to collaborate—especially if you don’t have a marketing department. It might be time to bring in an expert: Vision. We’ve been collaborating with sales and business owners for years, gathering the data, providing constant updates, and aligning sales, marketing, and business strategies to get the most out of any initiative. Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can help.
