6 tips to unite your sales and marketing team

Businesses that have a collaborative marketing and sales team are among the elite. They have a strong understanding of how to promote your business, get in front of the customer, and close the sale. However, marketing and sales are also notorious for maintaining silent rivalries driven by miscommunication, different goals, mistrust and more. So how do you build, or re-build, and nurture the relationship between marketing and sales? To do that, we address what's historically pulled the two apart, and what can be done to mend them back together again. 

1. Sales don’t see the relevance in marketing campaigns most of the time

This usually happens when there’s a lack in communication between the two teams. Combat this with joint meetings where both teams can discuss the aspects of any marketing campaigns.

2. Marketing gets frustrated when sales don't share content or collateral created 

In some cases, sales doesn’t know the best way to connect the marketing-created-content to its intended audience (the customer). To help, discuss the purpose of the content, as well as the topics, problems or solutions the content covered. 

3. Sales can't find marketing collateral

Marketing collateral are usually saved in a shared space like Google Drive or DropBox but oftentimes, it’s only shared between members of the marketing team. Simply sharing the collateral with sales will help alleviate this problem.

4. Marketing isn’t providing quality leads to sales

This is a result of miscommunication between the two teams as well as conflicting metrics. In order to solve this problem, sales can provide marketing with the questions they get from customers or prospects so the latter can create content around these questions. Basing content on what prospects or customers want to see will help attract better leads.

5. Sales should mark contacts in the CRM and “close the loop”

Marking contacts in the CRM (customer relationship management) and providing feedback will let marketing know that the leads they are providing are working. Collaboration will help both teams create a CRM system that will work for sales and marketing.

6. Marketing hands over information to sales and moves on

For a lot of companies, there’s not enough consideration given to the process of lead generation, prospect nurturing and lead conversion. If sales and marketing work together throughout the entire buyer’s journey, this collaborative effort will produce better ideas that can further delight customers.

Both sales and marketing are responsible for nurturing leads and turning them into customers. That’s why there’s a need for both teams to be able to effectively communicate with prospects.

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Author's note: Information on this post was sourced from Hubspot Marketing