How to Improve Collaboration Between Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Sales and marketing have had a complimentary relationship since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Traditionally, marketers hunt leads; and sales converts them to customers. They heavily rely on each other to succeed, but more often than we’d like, they’re not working together as a unified team. To bring in new customers, sales and marketing teams must shift from a “support” mindset to a “partnership” model where both teams solidify and optimize a symbiotic relationship that ultimately results in more wins.

Here are a few key ways that you can improve collaboration between your sales and marketing teams to produce more wins:

1. Establish Shared Goals and KPIs across Both Teams

The corporate connection between Sales and Marketing can amount to a wasted symbiotic relationship: The two teams need each other to survive, but they often fail to depend on each other in ways that would keep them both alive and thriving. The concept of a mutually beneficial partnership gets lost in the fantasy of “we do this, and you do … well, whatever it is you do up on your floor.” Practically speaking, Marketing and Sales share the same goals and objectives: creating value and increasing the bottom line. It’s important to establish shared goals and KPIs between both departments in order for everyone to be successful. Some examples of shared Goals and KPIs include:

• Revenue Growth: This is a fundamental shared goal. Both sales and marketing contribute directly to increasing the company’s overall revenue.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Marketing efforts generate leads, and sales converts them. Optimizing CAC requires both teams to work efficiently to acquire new customers at a lower cost.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): While often seen as a sales metric, marketing plays a crucial role in nurturing customer relationships and driving repeat business, directly impacting CLTV.
• Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate: Marketing generates leads, and sales qualifies them into opportunities. A high conversion rate here indicates effective lead generation by marketing and efficient qualification by sales.

2. Foster Open Dialogue between Sales and Marketing

Communication is crucial for collaboration between your sales and marketing departments. Work together to create plans, but know that you might have to go “off roading” because sometimes the path takes an unexpected turn or disappears before your eyes. That’s OK. You can build in the possibility of unanticipated outcomes. Just be sure that when implementing your plan—and all its possible iterations—you’ve got clear, consistent communication between Sales and Marketing. Only then can you all learn, adapt, and make sound choices as one big team, improving the process by increments as you go. What you want always is the best partnership you can build. Remember, we’re stronger together.

3. Integrate Technology and Data Effectively across Both Teams

In reality, there’s more crossover between the departments these days, and there is some great technology, like Hubspot, Salesforce, Marketo, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, that support the efforts of both teams. Top-performing companies understand all this. When it comes to how to use technology and data, let’s take a look at a something like “lead scoring”. Lead generation is obviously in Marketing’s wheelhouse, but it’s really important when leads come in to score them objectively. A new marketing campaign can result in a flood of leads, but if all or most of those leads score low, they’re of little to no worth either to Sales or to the business as a whole. On the flipside, marketing campaigns that might have been previously seen as low-value initiatives could bring in fewer but higher quality leads. When you use technology and data to make informed decisions, performance across sales and marketing can dramatically improve. Below are some key examples of technology and data most commonly shared across both marketing and sales:

Technology:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System: This is the most fundamental shared technology. A CRM system like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows both teams to track leads, customer interactions, sales pipelines, and customer history. Marketing can use it to understand lead sources and campaign effectiveness, while sales relies on it for lead management and deal progression.
• Marketing Automation Platform (MAP): Tools such as HubSpot, Marketo, or Pardot (now part of Salesforce) help automate marketing tasks like email campaigns, lead nurturing, and landing page creation. Integrating the MAP with the CRM ensures that sales has visibility into a lead’s marketing engagement, and marketing can segment audiences based on CRM data.
• Content Management System (CMS): A CMS (e.g., WordPress, Drupal, HubSpot CMS) houses all marketing content (blog posts, whitepapers, case studies). Sales can leverage this content directly in their outreach to prospects, ensuring brand consistency and providing valuable resources to potential customers.
• Sales Enablement Platforms: Platforms like Highspot or Seismic provide sales teams with easy access to marketing-approved content, training materials, and playbooks. This ensures sales reps are using the most up-to-date and effective messaging.
• Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) Tools: Tools like Google Analytics, Tableau, or Power BI can consolidate data from various sources (CRM, MAP, website) to provide both teams with insights into campaign performance, sales trends, customer behavior, and overall business health.

Data:

• Lead Data: Information about leads, including their source, demographics, firmographics, and engagement scores (how interested they appear based on their interactions with marketing materials).
• Customer Data: Comprehensive profiles of existing customers, including purchase history, service interactions, product usage, and feedback.
• Campaign Performance Data: Metrics on how marketing campaigns are performing, such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates for specific content, and cost per lead.
• Sales Pipeline Data: Real-time visibility into the status of deals, including lead stage, deal size, expected close dates, and reasons for wins/losses. This helps marketing understand which campaigns are generating the most valuable leads.
• Market and Competitor Intelligence: Insights into market trends, competitor activities, and customer needs, which can inform both marketing messaging and sales strategies.
• Website Analytics: Data on website traffic, user behavior, popular content, and conversion paths, providing insights into what resonates with potential customers.

4. Drive Alignment between Sales and Marketing Teams thorugh Leadership and Organizational Support

In business, change almost always comes from the top. It’s up to leadership to effectively communicate the message that Sales and Marketing have to join together to function as one big team. Again, this mandate succeeds best when those at the highest level of the organization clearly outline the goals and objectives that are foundational to the success of the business. When failure arises, usually the blame game is not far behind. What typically happens is that Sales says it’s Marketing’s fault, and Marketing turns around and points the finger at Sales. In hindsight, members of both teams are pretty certain who made the mistakes and what everyone should have done differently … if only they’d been the ones doing the decision making. You can increase the chances of succeeding more often by defining goals and objectives, and by ensuring that they’re understood and agreed upon by all. From there, sales and marketing department heads can develop actionable plans, with steps, benchmarks and clear accountability for both teams.

Viewing the business from this standpoint is key to objectively holding each team accountable for steps they can control and outcomes they can influence: It’s Marketing’s responsibility to generate quality leads, which is what Sales wants; Sales is accountable for closing deals, which is what Marketing wants.

5. Build a Strong Feedback Loop between Sales and Marketing for Continual Improvement

Marketing paves the way for successful sales. They seed the ground, they’re out in front scouting, doing recon—however you want to put it, they’re up ahead getting leads. They have systems in place for this, such as specific marketing automation software and CRMs. Not only do marketers bushwhack to uncover what’s out there, they leave a breadcrumb trail of leads that’s archived and trackable.

By now, most everybody understands that today’s customers are pretty savvy. The internet has provided them with the tools to weigh their options quite early on in the buying cycle. This represents a monumental shift in buying habits that has resulted in sales wielding a lot less influence during the research phase of the buying process. This change in buying habits means that marketing is now tasked with producing “assets” that clearly demonstrates the importance of solving a problem. At the same time the assets must be targeted to establish credibility in the organization and the product/service. The tricky part is sales is not there to back that up with a conversation, the way they might have been in the old days. Assets can include things like white papers, e-books, case studies and infographics. When done right, such collateral stands in for the “early conversation,” effectively communicating a targeted message, creating awareness, building credibility and encouraging the prospect to engage with sales.

Sales reps are out in the field, face-to-face and ear-to-ear with customers. They have a better, more honed understanding than Marketing does of the art and science of verticals. Fluent in the various dialects of industry, Sales possesses a great sense of how different target markets need to be communicated with. This is something they can share with marketing creatives, who in turn can tailor collateral to speak to different verticals in ways that are understandable, relevant, and effective. Sales can be a life-saver if Marketing starts circling the drain of the creative process. Sales can see the big customer picture; sometimes they know when enough is enough. Too, Marketing may set their sights on false indicators. For example, increased web traffic doesn’t necessarily translate to increased leads.

If you’re in sales, do sales, don’t try to market. Nothing leads to a marketing mishap faster than sales taking a well-meaning stab at creating their own marketing collateral. Part of marketing’s job is to conduct user testing of things like subject lines and branding colors. They’re trained in massaging content and getting digital and print pieces delivered professionally and efficiently. Sales members attempting to play marketer can derail legit marketing projects already well underway.

Sales knows from negativity when it comes to customers. They get an earful about customers’ objections and frustrations. This type of behind-the-scenes knowledge can be communicated to creatives and make marketing materials shine with just the right polish to push customers to their happy place. Marketers, think of sales reps as the mouth piece of the customer. You’re already familiar with user testing, so take the time out to interview sales reps about the common concerns of clients. Then you can take that data and incorporate it into your blogs, newsletters, and other tailored pieces of collateral.

The invaluable information Sales picks up is what the clients’ need are at a particular point and time. That’s huge. Sales reps are talkers. They’re also good listeners, and their job is to listen to the customer. Marketers, take note of specific conversations that your peers in Sales have had with actual customers. If you fail to listen when Sales communicates the customers’ needs, you could waste time and resources, taking the “mark” out of “marketing” by missing the mark.

Marketing and Sales Rely on Each Other for Optimal Success

Marketers open doors, but they don’t close deals. Sales puts the ink on the agreements; sometimes that means negotiating first, another thing in the wheelhouse of sales reps. In contrast, good sales outcomes are heavily reliant on good marketing practices. Combined, it’s all of that which strengthens the bottom line. There’s a necessary connection between Marketing and Sales, so let’s put our differences in the recycle bin and repurpose a beautiful partnership. If you’re a serious sales rep, bond with the marketing creatives in your company. You don’t have to be best buds, you just need to put aside professional differences (misunderstandings, really) and work with them, not against them, to get the job done. And, please, no clipart. Ever.

Justin Zappulla

Justin brings over 20 years’ sales and sales leadership experience as Managing Partner of Janek Performance Group. Justin’s career has been highlighted by remarkable performance and is considered one of the top authorities and thought leaders in sales training, sales consulting and sales performance improvement. Justin co-authored the highly acclaimed sales book, Critical Selling and was a key contributor to the sales book Mastering the World of Selling. An often-quoted authority on sales and sales management practices, Justin has widely been recognized as one of the biggest names in sales.

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