The marketing/sales relationship is the engine of your business. When both teams are working in harmony with each other, the leads come in and they become customers. But, if this interface doesn't work, if teams can't effectively communicate with each other, or they find themselves working against each other, sales don’t get made. Today we'd like to look at five elements that contribute to marketing and sales cooperation and how they can be optimized.
First, we'd like to illustrate the differences between marketing and sales, as definitions tend to vary by organization. By "marketing" we mean "back-end" activities like consumer research, lead generation and advertising. In other words, tasks that are focused on generating interest and developing a deeper understanding of subsets of the general population. "Sales," meanwhile, means converting prospects to paying customers. Unlike the marketing team, salespeople deal with prospects on a one-on-one basis or smaller groups of prospects.
Using these definitions as a baseline, the fundamental relationship between these two groups become clear: marketers empower salespeople to convert prospects.
Which bring us to the five key elements of the marketing/sales relationship:
Prospect information generation and dissemination. Marketers can only empower salespeople if they provide them with actionable demographic data and content to help sales personalize the pitch. Furthermore, marketers need to contextualize this information in a larger framework. It isn't enough to say that working mothers are looking for safe, affordable and environmentally-friendly cars; they need to create in-depth buyer personas to effectively educate their colleagues in sales to give them a fuller picture of this demographic
Two-way communication. The process of accumulating data is a two-way street: salespeople need to convey to marketers new developments, trends and data in the customer base. They also need to tell marketers about the quality of the leads they're receiving. If a certain kind of lead has been converting at a higher rate, marketers can use this information to generate similar leads.
The marketing "sit in" sales call. Marketers should sit in on sales calls either as a silent participant or to help close the deal. In either case, the marketer gets a better idea of the nuts and bolts of the sales call, the obstacles faced by the sales staff and makes marketers and sales staff feel like they're on the same page. Furthermore, if the marketer is an active participant, you can adopt the classic "good cop/bad cop" approach, whereby the marketer is the "ideas" person attuned to industry trends and content details, while the sales rep handles the commercial elements like contract length, cost, etc.
Objection handling. This is a classic example of where marketers provide sales staff with powerful insights to drive conversions. By "objections" we simply mean the reasons why a prospect won't convert. These reasons generally boil down to price point, lack of perceived value or the fact that the prospect lacks the authority to purchase the product. In each of these three instances marketers should provide counter-points to "handle" the prospect's objection. If price is the obstacle, marketers can provide talking points around the value of the product, new features or authorize discounts. The point here is to make sure that the sales person is never caught off guard by a prospect's reason for balking at purchasing a product or service.
Measurement and tracking. You don't need us to tell you that sales and marketing teams love to measure their performance. But make sure you're measuring the right things: leads generated, conversions, lead flow (the volume and quality of leads they pass on to sales), and percent of "leads worked."
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