In any business, marketing and sales are equally crucial departments, responsible for growing the business, and ensuring its success. While sales and marketing are fundamentally different practices, they both work towards the same goal: ensuring the success of your company.
Unfortunately, for many years, marketing and sales teams have operated in siloed environments, failing to interact with each other to guarantee better outcomes. However, research reveals that 73% of respondents believe their revenues increase when sales and marketing teams are aligned.
Marketing vs Sales: What is Marketing and Sales?
Sales and marketing teams have long had a somewhat complex relationship at best, but they’re designed to work better together than they do alone.
Sales teams are responsible for interacting with customers, pitching opportunities, and convincing clients to make that crucial purchasing decision. Marketing professionals are the people who build your company’s reputation, attract new customers towards the sales team, and provide sales with the scripts they need to convert leads.
Unfortunately, relationships can be difficult to build between these two teams, because marketers often blame sales professional for not doing a right job with nurturing and following up with leads. On the other hand, sales reps complain marketing teams aren’t bringing in enough quality leads to ensure successful conversions.
Overcoming this friction, and creating an integrated marketing and sales team, is how companies set themselves apart from the competition, and achieve better results.
What Happens When Sales and Marketing Work Together?
Perhaps the most significant initial benefit of integrating marketing and sales teams, is that you get to know your customer on a deeper level. Sales teams are the people who actually communicate with clients on a day-to-day basis. When they can share their experiences with the marketing team, you can get a more detailed idea of why customers choose your brand over competitors, and what factors they look at when making a purchase.
The input of the sales team helps marketers to create more accurate, in-depth buyer personas, so marketing strategies can have a more relevant, targeted message. Likewise, sales team benefit from the marketing teams feedback on which campaigns have been the most successful, as this can help to guide sales professionals in deciding which sales strategies to use.
Other benefits of an integrated marketing and sales approach include:
- You’ll know how to convert customers: Salespeople collect significant knowledge by engaging with prospective clients on a daily basis. By sharing insights with marketing teams, your sales team can ensure your entire business has a better view of what influences your target audience and helps them to make decisions.
- Customer experiences improve: When communication between sales and marketing teams is consistent, everyone can work together towards a better customer experience. If your sales and marketing teams both know what your customers care about, they can develop strategies to deliver the kind of meaningful experiences leads are looking for.
- Improved efficiency: Good communication between the sales and marketing team also means companies can operate more effectively. Work doesn’t get duplicated or overlooked when silos are removed from the conversion roadmap. As collaborative efforts expand, the marketing and sales team can work together to get jobs done more efficiently.
- Marketing can nurture cold leads: Sales professionals will naturally go for the easiest targets. Hotter prospects allow for quicker, simpler sales, and better target acquisition. When more reluctant leads appear in the customer journey, marketing materials can help to nurture and convert them into leads more comfortable with the idea of making a purchase. This can ensure luke-warm leads don’t slip away.
- Sales teams get more opportunities to convert: When marketers use the feedback from sales teams to improve their marketing messages, they increase their chances of sending highly targeted, warm, and relevant leads to the sales team. This means sales professionals get more chances to convert customers, and waste less of their time on leads which might not be relevant to the company.
How does marketing and sales work together?
Marketing and sales professionals are naturally aligned in the quest to convert customers and make sales. The difference is simply that marketing teams line the leads up for sales professionals, while sales teams do the work of closing the deal.
To ensure marketing and sales teams work together, companies need to eliminate the silos between these two groups. Both sets of employees need a way to conveniently communicate and share knowledge on a consistent basis. This could mean setting each team up with access to collaboration tools that offer access to a centralized CRM system.
Sales teams can use customer relationship management technology to track the progress of deals and make notes about their interactions with clients – helping to strengthen the company’s knowledge of its target audience. Marketing teams can use the CRM and the information submitted by the sales team to create more in-depth buyer personas for marketing purposes.
Both groups can then work together on keeping the CRM data as up-to-date and relevant as possible, so everyone in the business is making decisions based on authentic insights into the customer, and what drives purchasing actions.
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