There are a lot of different factors that create a good sales department that will win a lot of deals, but one of the main factors that contribute to this is the collaboration between the sales department and marketing department. LxaHub states that 56% of businesses with their sales and marketing departments aligned meet their revenue goals, and a further 19% beat their targets. In this article, we will look at the different reasons why it is key for your sales and marketing teams to collaborate.
Marketing and sales can be difficult to differentiate for some people, however, they are two different departments that have very different functions.
Marketing – A marketing department is responsible for a lot of different factors in a business. The overall goal of a marketing team is to attract more customers to a business to make more sales. This can be done by increasing the company’s brand presence, relationships with customers and more. Marketing mainly deals with the macro elements of your business as it focuses on external factors outside of your business e.g., brand presence.
Sales – A sales team is responsible for winning a sale. Once the marketing team raises awareness for the business, bringing more potential customers in, the sales team will have to take those leads and complete sales. A sales team is usually responsible for the microelements in your business, as they interact with the customers in the business when completing deals.
Both departments are crucial for a business’s growth, and if these teams collaborate, they can bring brilliant results to a business’s sales. 60% of businesses believe that misalignment between sales and marketing hurts their financial performance, shared by LxaHub.
The marketing department contributes a lot of different important things to your sales team that can greatly help them succeed and win more deals.
Firstly, a marketing team is responsible for lead generation. This means that the leads that the sales team will be contacted will have been attained by the marketing team. The quality of the lead that is generated is very important for the sales team to succeed. A high-quality lead is a lead that matches your target market, meaning your product will be able to help their problem and they will be interested in your product for the price range you are offering.
The interaction between a sales team and a client should be a continuation of the message that a marketing team highlights when generating leads. Information on the product or service, pricing, benefits and more all need to be consistent between both departments. This will help keep your brand image consistent, with the product you are offering, your business values and also your organisational goals.
The marketing team can get a good understanding of your business’s customers through research. As a result, the marketing department will be able to share details on the types of clients that are in the market with the sales team, to help them better understand their customers. Furthermore, information on the clients such as the channels they are being generated through will help the sales department as they will know where to research to find out more about the customers. A LinkedIn study shares that 94% of the top-performing salespeople called the leads marketing to generate for “them” as “excellent” or good.
By knowing more about your customers, you will be able to stay in touch with them and build long-term relationships for repeat purchases and renewals. The marketing department can assist in this long-term relationship with communication channels like informal or lead-nurturing emails. This will help the sales team have more chances to interact and sell multiple products or services to a customer. Furthermore, good nurturing and relationship building by the marketing team could increase the likelihood of a sale being won due to them already having a relationship with your business.
With collaboration with the marketing and sales departments, your business will be able to get ahead in the market. The marketing team is able to segment the types of customers that the business and sales team requires, targeting different customers at different times. This will help your business stay ahead of its competition, being able to make more strategic moves to win deals.
To improve collaboration between these two departments, methods such as technology adoption and regular meetings are popular.
A business adopting communication software can greatly help with the collaboration between these two departments. This is because using communication software will make staying on the same page much easier and streamlined. Any urgent messages that need to be sent can be done instantaneously.
A good CRM software will combine data from the marketing department and sales department into one place for everyone to see. This means that the data visibility will increase across your business helping your sales team get a better understanding of your customers with information that the marketing team has generated.
Meetings are key to making sure that the multiple departments in your business are all working towards the same organisational goal collaboratively. Meetings should include sharing insights about important information on clients and tasks and schedules, and how each department is working towards organisational goals. These meetings should be concise and set clear goals and objectives for your departments to meet. This will help your business perform on a higher level and generate more revenue.
Creating joint KPIs is a great strategy for the business as this is a great way of making sure that both departments are working towards the same organisational goals. This will greatly increase the collaboration between the departments as they will now want to hit targets together, rather than being more interested in hitting their own targets separately from each other.
TEB is a sales automation CRM software that can transform your business’s sales cycle, resulting in more sales being made and exponential growth occurring. The way that TEB does this is through unique features such as:
If you would like to find out more about how TEB will help you transform your business, get in contact with us here to schedule a demo.
