If you want to see improvement in both your marketing and sales results, one of the best things you can do is make sure that your sales team is involved in marketing planning. Collaboration makes all the difference!
All too often, sales and marketing teams operate in their separate silos, pursuing their own goals and rarely coordinating their efforts. The end results of this kind of separation? Wasted budgets, duplicated work, and missed revenue opportunities.
For real success, marketers need to bring the sales team into the planning and execution process right from the start. There are a lot of different ways to do this, but they all have one thing in common: unified efforts for better results.
The Importance of Regular Joint Meetings
Meeting together as a team is the foundation of collaboration. Sales and marketing planning meetings are incredibly useful when implemented correctly.
These sessions should focus on setting shared objectives, mapping out integrated campaigns, aligning your goals, and clearly defining the roles of each team.
What if you outsource your marketing? Does that mean that your sales team and marketing team can’t meet? Not at all! Sales and marketing can still work together when you outsource to a professional marketing team. You just need to make sure that the marketing company understands the importance of a sales and marketing collaboration.
Create Ongoing Communication Channels
Meetings aren’t the only way to communicate. Collaboration can involve:
- Regular emails
- Dedicated Marketing/Sales chat channels (like on Slack or Teams)
- Sync-up calls
- Weekly recaps of marketing campaigns, new content, and performance
- Options for marketing reps to listen to sales calls (live or recordings)
Include the Sales Team in Developing Buyer Personas
Sales reps interact with customers every day. That gives them unique and important knowledge about what motivates buyers.
Your sales team knows:
- What types of leads are most likely to convert
- What pain points come up over and over again
- What people come into the sales call already knowing
- The questions people have most often about the company’s products or services
Marketing teams should tap into this knowledge to build meaningful and useful buyer personas. The more detailed and accurate the buyer persona can be, the more likely it is for the sales team to be able to convert marketing leads into repeat customers.
What can your sales team share with the marketing team for buyer persona development?
- Precise triggers that prompt purchases
- Common buyer objections and how they are overcome
- Buying process nuances from one buyer profile to another
- Questions customers ask at each stage in the process
- How customer needs evolve over time
Develop Asset Libraries with Shared Access
Just like your marketing team needs to see sales data and insights, your sales team needs to see what marketing is doing. Collaborative sales and marketing planning requires the sales team to know what marketing is up to.
For sales reps to truly leverage all of the great marketing content, they need to be able to easily access that content. Marketing shouldn’t just push content out into the world, but they should also make sure that the sales team sees and understands all of the work they are doing.
This creates far more informed sales conversations because the salesperson will understand the messages that the prospect has already received through marketing. This takes a lot of guesswork out of the sales call.
Your marketing team should build well-organized and easily searchable content asset libraries integrated with your company’s sales tools, such as your CRM software.
Make it seamless and effortless for sales reps to access marketing collateral, customize emails, tap into those social media posts, and use every possible marketing asset to continue the conversation and move their prospect through the funnel.
Cogo & Co. Can Break Down the Barriers Between Marketing and Sales
When you work with Cogo & Co., our marketing professionals understand the important work of the sales team. Barriers between sales and marketing teams only slow down the growth of your company and impede revenue building.
How ready is your company for real, meaningful growth? Take the Cogo & Co. Growth Readiness test and get your customized scorecard with information about how you can improve your sales results quickly and easily.
