The Marketing and Sales Teams often compete with each other within organizations. For example, sales reps can blame the marketers for low-quality leads, while marketers can point to obsolete scripts from the sales team as their reason for failure. Would site visitors buy the product? Marketers might say only drive traffic to the website. It is indeed very proper that these departments follow the separation of church and state in task distribution.
But the biggest challenge is to not forget that they have a common goal – to attract relevant customers. The difference between the teams is that they tend to work at different parts of the funnel. Sometimes, employees spend too much time explaining this to each other, and disagreements in the team pose an amplified risk for the business, particularly in adverse economic situations.
Read More: Influencer Marketing Vs Celebrity Endorsement
Tasks of Each Department
- Inform potential customers of the goods and services offered by the company, even when their name is unknown to them.
- Encourage people who are on their way to becoming familiar with the company, but who have neither met it nor bought anything yet, to do that.
- Retain existing loyal customers and encourage them to recommend the brand to friends and colleagues.
It is not Always Possible to Interact
Actually, there are many instances in real life where marketers and sales managers don’t share exactly the same understanding, as in The Brand Marketing Ideas for Small Business.
- The marketing department has organized an online event for new customers, with the mandatory condition of registering for the webinar and providing a telephone number or email. After the end of the event, if the collected contact base is not processed by the sales department, very likely the webinar will never recoup.
- The current clients received a mail-expecting 50% off for the next three months if the clients consent to prepayment from the Department of Marketing. If Sales do not contact customers nor act on their replies to the newsletter, it will prove less viable as a fundraiser.
- The marketing department began targeted sales by offering exclusive conditions to attract new customers and called for contacting the sales department for further details. If it is that the sales department does not have an idea of the offers, refuses to answer, and also makes huge mistakes, then the budget for setting up and executing the advertisement campaign is gone.
Thus, the sales department is not only supposed to deal with the leads well but also to put forward their request for marketing campaigns. By understanding customer needs, marketers will help the sales team build further entry points, which will in turn help mitigate the cost of customer acquisition.
Work towards a process of productive dialogue between the marketing and sales teams. Ideally, these meetings should take place daily. In that dialogue, the teams should inform each other about their plans, work foci, strategies, and ideas. An important component of this circle is evaluating work effectiveness, materials about the product, communication channels with customers, and successful and unsuccessful experiences.
A salesperson is not technically a marketer, yet there is the necessity for him to be aware of exactly what a marketer does within the company. Similarly, a marketer must possess knowledge of the salesperson’s work. Start a “Stay in My Shoes” project where, for example, a marketer spends an hour or a shift doing a salesperson’s job supervised by the sales manager. Or the other way around salesperson embedded in the marketing department.
To Optimize Collaboration Top Rules
For the interaction between marketing and sales departments to be close to ideal, it is better to adhere to the rules:
- At joint planning meetings or inter-departmental conversations, the representatives from the departments get together and agree on the marketing activities that can help the sales department in the acquisition of new customers.
- Then the marketing department executes these activities and transfers the leads to the sales department, ideally automatically, hence they are immediately uploaded to the CRM system;
- The leads are worked on by the sales department immediately while hot.
Removing any of these steps makes the processes less efficient:
- Salespeople are not briefed about the marketing activity
- The consequences are that the salespeople might not be able to handle the flood of calls, or they might not have a clue as to what the marketing offer is. As a result, there may be some negative feedback coming back from customers due to delays in response or lousy work done on behalf of the team.
- Marketing is indeed active, but sales are having no leads coming in.
- The reasons could vary, from problems with integrating the system into a CRM database to mere forgetfulness. It leaves the sales without anything to work on.
- If no feedback is availed from the sales department on the quality of customers, then perhaps it will be odd for marketing to focus on such activities in the future. This will also make subsequent campaigns less predictable in their outcomes.
- The marketing department has not made enough allowance about the feasibility of activities as to attach value to Customers either gives them too much or none at all.
Communicate, Share Opinions, and Ask for Advice.
Obviously, the attitude towards anyone communicating in such a friendly and open way serves to greatly increase the chances of success as opposed to that of one wherein each member of the team lives for himself and refuses to accept the mutual responsibility of team results.
