How To Enable Your Sales Team – Part 4
Sometimes the failure to build a strong line of communication between two parties can result in disaster. Nobody wants a disaster and that’s why everybody wants their sales and marketing team to get along.
Instead of maintaining a wall between both departments, a clear line of communication between sales and marketing is something you always want to establish early on.
With this final post in our How To Enable Your Sales Team series, we’re going to learn how to bridge the gap between sales and marketing and maintain a clear line of communication.
Bridging The Gap Between Sales And Marketing
The final step towards enabling a sales team that grows and wins together is establishing healthy communication between your sales and marketing departments. This is easier said than done though, right?
Marketing has a broad agenda in its responsibility to the business. Your marketing team is often required to have their hands in:
- Advertising
- Branding
- Lead generation
- Market research
- Web content
- Social media
Sales, on the hand, has a specific focus. Your sales team is tasked with acquiring customer leads, qualifying those leads, managing a sales pipeline, and staying focused on key touch-points that move a general inquiry to a qualified lead to a paying customer.
Regardless of these differences, both teams can find some common ground in their main objectives:
- Making customers happy
- Growing revenue for the business
Finding Common Ground
It’s absolutely essential that there aren’t any walls constructed between these two departments so that everyone can work together toward their common goals. Here are three tips for bridging the gap between your sales team and marketing team to ensure this doesn’t happen.
- Try each other’s jobs on for size. Often, problems between sales and marketing pop-up from a simple misunderstanding of how each department operates. One solution to this problem is to have members of the marketing team spend a week with the sales reps to see how things work in their world. The following week, let your sales reps get a taste of what’s on your marketing team’s plate every week. This little lesson for everyone will open up opportunities to ask questions and learn from each other, establishing a healthy line of communication.
- Start Speaking The Same Language. Your sales team and your marketing team can’t communicate effectively if they aren’t even on the same frequency. Does everyone know what a “qualified lead” is? Can everybody define SEO? Making sure everybody has a basic understanding of the everyday lingo that’s an important part of each team’s respective job is crucial to building trust and knocking down that wall we talked about.
- Measure results together. Encourage your salespeople and marketing department to restructure their analytics and develop some metrics that accurately reflect the outcomes of both marketing and sales together. Nothing builds camaraderie like working towards, and reaching, a goal together.
This series has focused on the importance of enabling your sales team. If you don’t follow the advice in any of the three posts leading up to this one, please, at the very least, take the time to consider how your sales team and marketing team work together.
Both teams are vital to your company. Both teams need each other to do their jobs properly. But if you truly want to enable your sales team to be the best that they can be, providing a clear line of communication between sales and marketing is the best way to do it.
Catch up on the rest of our How To Enable Your Sales Team series:
How To Enable Your Sales Team – Part 1
