You Need to Align Your Sales Team with Your Marketing Team… Here’s Why

Sometimes, viewing your business in terms of its different departments—less of a cohesive workforce and more disparate teams—can be too easy. This is often a dangerous pattern to watch develop, especially where your sales and marketing are involved.

Let’s discuss why this pair needs to work collaboratively for your business to see optimal success and explore ways to encourage these behaviors in your organization.

What Can Alignment Between Your Sales and Marketing Teams Help Achieve?

By promoting cohesion between your sales and marketing teams, you can set your business up for improved success. After all, the sales team is responsible for closing deals and cementing business relationships, while marketing’s goal is to develop these relationships and build awareness of what you have to offer. If these two departments aren’t in lockstep, opportunities will be missed, and time will be wasted.

On the other hand, treating these different departments as a unit can help you keep your processes more streamlined and successful. With your marketing and sales working in tandem, you’re more likely to experience the kind of success you want to see from your business’ activities. This is especially true in B2B-focused industries, such as managed service providers, pharmaceutical manufacturing, insurance underwriting, facilities management, staffing and recruiting services, and many others.

Unfortunately, Many Factors Can Stymie Interdepartmental Alignment

There’s a lot that can put up barriers between these two essential departments. For instance:

• Sales and marketing may be under the impression that different goals are being prioritized. Your sales team may be committed to maximizing each lead's value, while marketing may be playing a numbers game and generating as many leads as possible. If these miscommunications persist, the departments will effectively pursue two different goal posts.
• Many businesses tend to view marketing as an expense, and often set budgetary restrictions to help restrict these expenses. Meanwhile, sales are seen as a revenue generator. The problem comes when the restrictions placed on marketing reduce the leads that sales have to work with, creating issues. It is essential that the perception of marketing shifts to that of an investment and that both departments be given the support they need to uphold their responsibilities.
• It is also unfortunate that there is often a misunderstanding about the overall company goal that forms between the sales and marketing departments. This makes it critical to establish what the business is trying to accomplish and ensure the two departments are keyed into this overarching goal and their roles in achieving it.

This all means it is critical to establish an environment focused on a shared perspective between sales and marketing… but how does one do that?

How to Align the Goals of Your Sales and Marketing Departments

Get Rid of the Departmental Mindset

As may be expected, the first way to fix these problems between your different departments is to eliminate the mindset of departmentalism in the first place. There isn’t a marketing department and a sales department; there’s one business with all team members working toward the same goal, and all efforts are ultimately in pursuit of this objective. Identify how these efforts intersect and promote awareness of how everyone’s work supports another’s.

Encourage Closer Communications

Related to the departmental mindset (as many of these tips will address), marketing and sales teams may not understand what the other focuses on at different times. Sales teams will frequently change targets based on several factors, and marketers need to know how and when these targets have shifted. By establishing better communications between departments and encouraging regular collaborative sessions, you can facilitate this kind of information sharing to benefit both sales and marketing processes.

Keep Track of All Interactions with Your Customers and Clients

Similarly, making information available to everyone who may need it, regardless of their department and based more on their role in your organization’s processes, also helps to break down walls. Consider how much easier it would be for different departments to accomplish their goals if they could access information without waiting for others to reply. By leveraging a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, you can track every interaction, allow anyone in your team to reference the information they need for their roles, and more effectively track all communications with all contacts.

Any Marketing Resource You Use Must Be in Lockstep with Your Sales Team

We’ve long provided comprehensive marketing services designed and tested to be effective for a service-based business like managed service providers, and we’re here to help augment any internal team you have or even serve as an entirely outsourced department. We’re ready to collaborate with your sales department to unify the efforts your business makes toward reaching its goals.