Sales and marketing always seem to be at odds with each other. It’s an age-old conflict: Sales blames marketing for delivering poor leads, and marketing points the finger at sales for not following up with leads in a timely enough manner. Tomato, tomahto.
Either way, the conflict won’t yield you any more revenue. Before productive conversations can begin, the blame game needs to stop.
We can all agree that the ultimate goal of any for-profit business is more revenue. Here are four ways you can help your sales and marketing teams collaborate better:
1. Align bonus goals.
Perhaps the easiest way to get sales and marketing on the same team is to align bonus goals. It sounds absurdly straightforward, but many companies aren’t yet aligning sales and marketing compensation goals.
Find areas where there’s a natural overlap—quota, sales-qualified leads, lead rating, etc.—and then tie them together. If everyone is working toward the same thing, collaboration will organically spring up to achieve mutual goals.
2. Score leads.
Lead scoring helps sales better see which leads are most likely ready to close, and, therefore, should be contacted first. Without this in place, your team could haphazardly spend time following up with contacts that never had any intention of buying your product. Help your sales team work more efficiently by rating leads.
3. Share customer personas.
Sales talks to customers and prospects all day. They have valuable insights into how these individuals think and speak. By encouraging a dialog between sales and marketing when lead-generating content is being developed, you’ll increase your odds of winning more business.
4. Track, follow, and share marketing campaign metrics.
After collaborating to produce the perfect lead-generation campaign, keep track of its effectiveness. Is it producing the desired results? If not, revisit it. Pull sales and marketing into a room to brainstorm things to test, pick 2-3 areas to adjust, and then start to test each of the agreed-upon items separately to see which change improves your results the most.
So there you have it, 4 things you can start doing today to help sales and marketing collaborate to produce more revenue for your business.
Whether you’re a company of 5 or 500, you can start benefiting from capturing better leads, reaching out to the hot leads first, and continually refining messaging to ensure you’re getting the most bang for the buck with every marketing dollar you spend.
Mark Sokol is the VP of product marketing and branding at ConnectWise. Read more ConnectWise guest blogs here.
