6 Reasons Marketing and Sales Should Work Together AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR KEYNOTE SPEAKER, BUSINESS STRATEGIST, SALES/LEADERSHIP EXPERT
Copyright by Meridith Powell
It’s an age-old problem, the friction between marketing and sales. In most organizations, they are like oil and water. With marketing feeling like they are doing all the heavy lifting – developing campaigns, strategies that tap new prospects and taking market awareness to a whole new level. While sales feel like marketing gets in the way of the important work – the actual sale, believing that deals only happen when salespeople make the calls, engage the customers, and ask for the business. When the truth is, they’re both right. In today’s marketplace, it takes both sales and marketing working together, as a team, to take your business to the next level.
they work together, most marketing and sales departments function in their own silos — working instead on their own individual goals and their strategies. The fastest path to growth and profitability is through the alignment of your sales and marketing teams. Here are six strategies you can use to make that happen:.
6 Strategies to Transform the Marketing and Sales Relationships 1.
Share the Vision – the vision for your company that is. Ensure that marketing and sales are designing their strategies, aligning their actions to support the overall vision of the company. Your company vision gives each department its purpose. It reminds them that the work they are doing is bigger than the department and silos in which they exist. It also reminds them that their success reaches beyond what they are doing impacts the overall success of your company.
2.
Unify the Goal – If marketing and sales are each measured, held accountable to, and given different goals; then it shouldn’t be a surprise that they don’t work together. If you want to increase collaboration and communication with sales and marketing, then the next step is to unify their goals. Never underestimate how powerful a goal is in driving behavior, and determining what actions your team members invest their time and energy in. A unified goal will fast-track the alignment of your sales and marketing teams.
3.
Force Communication – the more your sales and marketing teams, talk, the more time they spend together, the more they will understand each other. So with understanding comes collaboration and alignment. So you need to force that communication
Working together they can: Shorten the sales cycle Retain more customers Improve their forecasts Their market entry costs go down Cost of sales are lower And when the sales and marketing teamwork in tandem, companies report that they grow faster than those who don’t. The result? When marketing and sales work together, your market share expands, and your bottom line gets fat. However, even with all the evidence, all the benefits gained when
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