If your company is like a lot of companies today, you’ve noticed a rift of sorts between your Sales and Marketing teams: Instead of working together, they seem in constant competition with each other. Sound familiar?
Instead of working together towards common goals, Sales and Marketing are each working towards their own separate goals. These goals rarely mesh with the greater company goals and objectives, creating headaches for everyone involved—from top to bottom of the organizational chain.
Different Sides to the Same Coin
Sales and Marketing teams are both tasked with the same goal of bringing new buyers into a company, but the ways they go about this task are very different. Marketing’s primary concern is creating content that brings customers in, while Sales is primarily focused on actually closing the deal. The problem arises from the fact that each team is focused on a different part of the buyer’s journey, and there often isn’t an adequate bridge between where Marketing first encounters a buyer and where Sales picks them up.
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This lack of bridge and difference in focus increases tensions when deals fall through, because each team blames the other. Marketing might blame Sales for a lack of follow through, while Sales blames Marketing for inadequate content. With this in mind, it’s easy to see where the rivalry comes from.
The truth is, though, that the blame likely falls somewhere in the middle: Neither side is working as effectively as they could, because each is focused on different goals with no mind for how these goals need to fit together.
This isn’t to say that quotas aren’t important. Of course they are. Marketing needs a target to hit in terms of how much content they need to produce and in terms of how many leads they need to pass along to Sales, and Sales needs a target to hit in terms of how many deals they pitch and—ultimately—close. But if both of these quotas are worked independently of each other, without an understanding of how they impact each other, then it will all have been for nothing.
The Magic Formula
The real magic starts to happen when Sales and Marketing work together to fulfil common goals. Marketing is tasked with not only attracting as many leads as possible, but with attracting the right leads and developing them along their journey so that when they get to the sales team, Sales has a higher chance of success. This builds trust between the teams, propelling cooperation forward.
Here are some of the easiest ways to help get Sales and Marketing aligned:
- Encourage communication between Sales and marketing—neither should work in a vacuum.
- Develop a set of definitions that both teams will use to identify stages of the buyer’s journey and whether a lead is Sales Qualified (SQL), Marketing Qualified (MQL) or neither.
- Empower Sales to make use of the content that Marketing has put so much time and effort into creating.
- If you are using a CRM, ensure that both teams are cataloging the correct data so that the transfer of leads is streamlined.
Enjoying Shared Success
Once you are able to get Sales and Marketing working on the same team—and towards the same goals—the entire company can benefit from the increased successes that are bound to come. A more developed buyer’s journey, and proper lead nurturing between stages, ensures that only the most qualified leads get to Sales, and this increases the odds that Sales will indeed close a deal.
