3 Moves to Strengthen Collaboration Between Marketing and Sales
We have all experienced unhealthy, counterproductive battles between marketing and sales at some point in our careers. When you have two distinct departments filled with team members who generally have optimistic, energetic, and outgoing personalities, you have the makings of a powerhouse. However, because these two groups use different vernaculars, are driven by different end goals, and are charged with distinct objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs), they can naturally be at odds.
On one hand, having a shared goal of driving success for the company by filling and accelerating a healthy pipeline should bring the two teams together. On the other hand, it can leave them pointing fingers and feeling resentful due to unmet expectations. When either team falls behind or misses a goal, and the pressure is on, the two sides can quickly become divided. Blame, mistrust, and miscommunication ensue—it’s a vicious cycle.
Rather than simply accepting this unhealthy partnership, Spiro is focused on building a fruitful union based on transparency, alignment, and shared success that can thrive in even the most demanding environments.
Here are 3 significant moves marketing can make to deliver true value to sales for a strong, successful relationship that delivers lasting results:
1) Create marketing campaigns that are based in reality
A well-crafted and in-touch marketing campaign can have a huge impact on sales and company success. Market insights are key to creating such a successful marketing campaign. However, if marketing lacks consistent and sufficient data points from sales about what’s working and what’s not, marketing activities can suffer. A misinformed or disconnected campaign can not only cause sales teams to lose confidence in the abilities of the marketing team, but it can also cause prospects and customers to glaze over — resulting in lack of engagement and missed opportunities.
Sales reps are the feet on the street speaking regularly with prospects and customers directly about the company and solutions. They understand what draws people in and also what turns people away. If only marketing folks could easily gain access into the information that sales receives daily, they could create high-impact marketing campaigns. Sales can’t always take the time to sit down with marketing and share insights from sales calls. That’s where Spiro can help. Spiro transcribes and stores those phone calls and email threads delivering ready access to these insightful conversations. By enabling marketing to understand common objections and identify those “aha moments” from these transcripts, they can develop more effective messaging and supportive content that actually ignite productive conversations, which lead to real opportunities while also overcoming sales obstacles.
2) Become a vital resource to the sales team’s success
The worst thing for demand generation teams is to become a “take it or leave it” option for the sales team. To offer true value to sales, marketing must not only deliver high quality leads to sales, they must also provide some level of insight or assistance that helps progress the sales conversation further or faster.
One of the ways marketing can help is to inform sales of activity in real time. When a prospect shows intent through engagement with your website, emails, or other media, that’s the best time to “strike while the iron’s hot,” as they say! Marketing must be able to connect the dots for sales between a page visit, a clicked link or a downloaded piece of content, and an important follow-up by a sales rep. By integrating these connection points between a marketing platform and the CRM system, marketing can then automate processes to alert the right sales rep at the right time.
Spiro can effectively capture and deliver lead activity in a custom entity so that the sales reps not only are alerted to the engagement but also can gain the full picture of that prospect’s interest and full range of activity. This is something that the sales team will enjoy and eventually depend upon—transitioning the marketing team from a nice-to-have capacity to a must-have member of the team!
3) Generate alignment and measure progress from a single source of truth
Many times, the great divide between sales and marketing comes down to misaligned goals and objectives. If the two teams can agree upon KPIs and the overall objectives (measurable ones!), then it’s easier to track progress and contribution towards the plan. Be sure your objectives are leading to the same end goal and that they can support each other. It doesn’t work if expectations are not understood by both sides. Similarly, be sure that the lead generation numbers in your lead funnel targets can get the sales team to their revenue quotas.
Beyond goal alignment, reporting and tracking must be aligned as well. Traditionally, marketing and sales have used distinct platforms to run programs and track progress. By pulling data into the proactive relationship management system from Spiro, you can benefit from a more unified way to track goals and objectives across the two teams. Leveraging a common and fuller set of data for reporting and dashboards provides a single source of truth, which eliminates any doubt and confusion. This not only provides better visibility and measurement of KPIs, it also allows sales and marketing to work more effectively together to analyze program effectiveness and planning for future activities.
Congruence Drives Success
Our mission at Spiro is to drive organizational growth and maximize visibility. When companies fully integrate sales and marketing activities into the Spiro platform, the two teams are better able to be fully transparent and coordinated through shared language, dashboards, and integrated workflows. This allows the dynamic to shift away from the old push/pull patterns and evolve naturally into a more aligned collaboration where both departments feel accountable to one another and are more inclined to contribute to the other’s success. Learn more about the Spiro proactive relationship management platform and see how it can help drive your revenue generation programs to new heights.
