At Relative, we understand that businesses may face a range of challenges when it comes to coordinating their sales and marketing teams. We’ve worked with many clients who have struggled with common pain points such as, a lack of communication, different goals, and poor data sharing. But we know that with the right approach, these issues can be overcome.
However, we also understand that many businesses face additional marketing challenges that can impact their sales efforts. For example, some businesses may be dealing with multiple agencies, a lack of understanding of marketing terminology, or outdated marketing literature. Others may struggle to tell their story, or effectively demonstrate to customers of the value of their products and services.
As a marketing agency, we understand the importance of a cohesive relationship between sales and marketing teams. However, we also know that achieving this alignment can often be a challenge. In this article, we will explore some of the common pain points and issues that arise when trying to coordinate sales and marketing teams, as well as some solutions to overcome these challenges.
Some common pain points
- Different goals – while marketing teams focus on building brand awareness and generating leads, sales teams are more concerned with closing deals and hitting sales targets. This can lead to a lack of communication and a lack of understanding between the two teams, or worse – miscommunication to your leads and customers.
- Poor communication – communication is key to any successful relationship, and the relationship between sales and marketing teams is no exception. Poor communication can lead to misunderstandings, missed opportunities, and a lack of trust between the two teams.
- Lack of data sharing – sales and marketing teams often work with different data sets, which can lead to a lack of continuity. Marketing teams may have access to customer data, while sales teams may have access to sales data. Without sharing this data, both teams may be missing out on valuable insights that could help them better target their campaigns.
Sales and marketing departments are two of the most important departments in any business. After all, without sales, no one will buy your products and services. Without marketing, you won’t have a way to let people know about those products and services. But sometimes these two departments can find themselves working at cross-purposes. If that happens, you need to know how to align your sales and marketing teams so they’re working together towards one goal – generating leads.
Marketing and sales teams collaboration
The most important thing to remember when it comes to aligning your marketing and sales teams is that they should be working together toward a common goal. If they aren’t, you’ll end up with different goals and strategies, which can lead to confusion among customers and internal conflict within your company.
The first step to managing sales and marketing teams is to establish common goals. This can be achieved by bringing both teams together to discuss their objectives and finding ways to align them. For example, marketing teams can focus on generating leads that are more likely to convert into sales, while sales teams can provide feedback on the quality of leads generated by marketing.
Regular meetings, shared calendars, and open communication channels can help to improve communication and foster a better working relationship between the two teams.
Strategy is key
Create a collaborative internal strategy – sales and marketing teams should be working together every step of the way to ensure that they’re creating an integrated campaign that will resonate with your audience and drive conversions. This means having open lines of communication between both teams, as well as being flexible enough to change course if either team comes up with better ideas than originally planned.
You can’t have a successful campaign without defining what success looks like. Define the metrics you will use to measure success, such as conversion rates or traffic increases, and the time frame for measuring them. Who is your target audience? How will you reach them? What budget are you working with for this campaign? What goals does it need to meet in order for it to be considered successful?
Define your target audience
As you begin to align your sales and marketing teams, it’s important to define your target audience. What are the needs of your customers? How can you help them achieve their goals? What are their pain points? That is, what prevents them from achieving their goals? Can you solve those problems for them so that they become happy customers who want to continue using your product or service in the future?
The next step is choosing the channels that are most effective for reaching your audience. Make sure you’re using the right channels for your business and campaign goals. For example, if one of your goals is to reach potential customers with a specific product or service, then Facebook Ads might be the best choice for you because it allows you to target specific demographics based on interests, location, age and more. But if another goal is selling more products overall (which could include getting more people into stores), an email marketing campaign might work better since subscribers opt-in by signing up themselves rather than being targeted by advertisers online as they browse content on social media sites like Facebook or Instagram.
A campaign control panel is a great way to monitor and manage your marketing campaigns. It should include a dashboard, reports and analytics so that you can track the progress of each campaign as it happens.
Map out your sales funnel
To coordinate your sales and marketing efforts, you’ll need to know what each department’s goals are. The first step is to map out your sales funnel. This will help you define each step in the process and see how they relate to one another.
The funnel is what we use to describe how your customers move through your marketing and sales processes.
The steps in this model are:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision/purchase
For example:
- Step 1: Prospects visit our website or social media page
- Step 2: They fill out a form on our website requesting more information about our services or products (this could be an informational piece like an ebook or whitepaper)
- Step 3: We follow up with them via email/phone call if they haven’t responded after a few days
Create a marketing strategy
- Define your target audience
- Understand their needs and pain points
- Choose the best channel(s) to reach them
- Develop a campaign control panel that allows you to track metrics and make adjustments quickly, if needed
- Create a collaborative strategy with sales and marketing teams to agree on how success will be measured for each campaign, who owns what parts of it, where resources should be allocated within each department or team, etc.
- Dealing with multiple agencies
Working with multiple agencies can be a headache for businesses, as it can lead to inconsistencies in branding and messaging. To streamline your marketing efforts and reduce costs, we recommend working with one lead agency to oversee all marketing work. One of the advantages of this approach is having a cohesive strategy that all other agencies can align with. In addition, consolidating your marketing efforts can greatly improve alignment and communication between departments and ensure your brand’s messaging is consistent across all channels.
Does this resonate with your business? We’re here to assist you!
Aligning your sales and marketing departments can be the key to improving results. In fact, it’s one of the most important steps you can take as a business owner or manager who wants to grow their company.
At Relative, we understand the importance of harmonising sales and marketing teams. We work closely with our clients to establish common goals, improve communication, and share data to ensure that their campaigns are as effective as possible. By taking a holistic approach to marketing, we help our clients to achieve their objectives and grow their business.
If your sales and marketing aren’t aligned, it’s time to take a look at what’s going wrong with your strategy.
Book a call with us now and we can chat through the issues that you’re having in order to come up with some tangible solutions to help your business and offer ROI on your campaign budgets.
Book a call now.
