4 Ways To Get Your Marketing And Sales Teams On The Same Page
Consumers are bombarded with ads every day. In an oversaturated digital landscape, they crave meaningful interactions. Viewers are looking for a deeper relationship with brands. So if you want to grab customers' attention, you need to create a focused and seamless experience that suits their unique needs.
Building this type of expertise is impossible without aligning sales and marketing, and the gap between sales and marketing is widening. According to the Office of the Super, this costs companies more than $1 trillion annually. The survey shows that 85% of companies believe that aligning marketing and sales is their greatest opportunity to improve business performance today.
If you get confused between sales and marketing, don't worry. You are not alone with these problems. Here are four key steps you can take to close the gap in your team:
1. Create the right organizational structure. The gap between sales and marketing is often structural. In today's market, most purchases are made digitally. As consumers research more independently, advertising messages need to be more involved in marketing. But who is responsible for the material?
said Thomas Manders, founder and CEO of Coffee. + Dan. , a customer engagement partner focused on delivering customer-centric solutions that drive growth. "This will help manage the customer lifecycle and ensure every step of the buying journey is considered and managed, including order creation, customer service, content, business development and some product management."
By clarifying the structure and responsibilities of your sales and marketing departments, you can help eliminate any confusion. Everyone will understand their responsibilities and how their combined efforts will contribute to the results of your work.
2. Agreement on Key Performance Indicators.
Vanity metrics have always been a problem in the marketing industry. After all, nobody wants to look bad, and ROI for multichannel marketing is hard to track. On the other hand, sales teams typically set revenue targets that reward results. This immediately creates tension between quantitative marketing metrics (e.g. likes, shares) and sales quality metrics (e.g. average transaction size, customer lifetime value).
"The problem is probably that the two metrics measure different things," says Jeffrey L. Cohen, senior analyst at Gartner Marketing Leaders, Marketing. This is a quantitative measure. Sales is responsible for providing the pipeline and revenue indicators that indicators are mainly qualitative, it does not fit the solution, it is difficult to close the deal and when both parties measure the impact of their income , they may want results on similar indicators.
By agreeing on specific generic metrics and how to present them, you bring your teams together and save time and effort comparing performance reports.
3. Create communication processes.
Once you have your organizational structure in place and identified KPIs, you can focus on reinvigorating delivery strategies and improving communications. According to McKinsey research, employees who communicate in the workplace are about five times more likely to report increased productivity. By improving communication between sales and marketing, you set both teams up for success.
For some companies, this can mean scheduling regular reviews or brainstorming sessions. For example, Megan Flannery, Drift's director of revenue marketing, explains that her company holds weekly collaborative meetings for marketing, sales, customer and partner success.
"There are four teams associated with revenue targets broken down by department," Flannery said. Each of these important groups reports on their growth and compares their performance to the others. This ongoing communication and collaboration helps ensure operations work together and fill potential gaps.”
4. Create a customer picture.
Just as you can offer the same greatness to three different friends in different ways (e.g. by focusing on scenic spots, short camping trips, or Instagram photo opportunities), you need to understand which aspects of your business will appeal to different audiences. An effective way to do this is to create customer personas so you understand the specific needs, preferences, and personalities of different target segments.
"Many business owners skip this step to save time, but skipping this step will ultimately hinder your success," says Abby Miller, editor of DMNews. "Developing data-driven customer personas for your business will help you break away from both sales and marketing. Virtual personas help your team members express conflicting opinions and ask meaningful questions. Personalize the conversation. Your marketing team can't say: "It will." Can't." Instead of your best salesperson, the objection can also be formulated in an unconfrontational way.
By using customer personas, you'll improve your marketing team's alignment, help them understand the appropriate channels and formats to use messages, and gain insights into audience behavior. This information can be shared with your sales team to further personalize your customer experience.
Putting marketing and sales on the same page is not easy, but it is possible. Follow these four tips and you'll be amazed at how quickly and effectively two teams can work together.
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