Despite their desired synergy for attracting, converting, and retaining customers, marketing and sales teams are often at odds within some companies. This common rift occurs when salespeople don’t recognize the value of marketing efforts and/or marketers don’t feel like sales reps are doing enough to input data for lead generation strategies.
To maximize your business revenue and profits, you need alignment of your marketing and sales teams. This is an overview of a few of the best strategies you can employ to create this alignment!
Emphasize Communication Collaboration
It is hard to understand what someone does without effective communication. Much of the tension in the marketing-sales relationship could be avoided if there were an effective collaboration between the two functions.
To avoid regular, time-consuming meetings, quality CRM programs offer collaboration tools. You can have marketing and sales teams share resources and input through a centralized communication system. Each side receives updates on all facets of loading and updating prospect or customer profiles. This communication platform allows each team to know what the other is doing, which enhances shared understanding.
Create Shared Goals
It is human nature to focus behaviors on specific goals and incentives for achieving them. In typical companies, marketing is rewarded for quality lead generation strategies and sales teams are rewarded for high conversion rates. To achieve alignment, you need to consider collaborative goals.
Find metrics, such as lead-to-conversion ratio, to emphasize roles that each team plays. With this metric, for instance, marketing is motivated to produce the best quality leads and sales is motivated to convert those leads as efficiently as possible.
With shared goals, it is easier to get professionals in each area to discuss strategies, tactics and problem-solving.
Track, Report and Adapt
If you can break down insecurities and protective instincts, everyone can benefit from reviewing analytics reports spanning the entire opportunity pipeline. Marketing needs to understand the correlation between particular users and behaviors to create the best lead generation strategies. However, sales reps need to see and understand these reports to realize the types of data they need to input.
If sales reps can see conversion reports and understand how different lead strategies and communication methods impact outcomes, they are more likely to participate in providing input.
Conclusions
To achieve CRM success, you need collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Marketers employ lead generation strategies that are affected by the quality and depth of data supplied by sales reps. Reps rely on targeted marketing materials to influence prospects and to attract the best-qualified leads for nurturing. A clear vision of shared reliance and common objectives are critical to alignment success.
Salesgenie can help you support the roles of marketing and sales teams in your organization by providing thorough, deep profiles on targeted prospects that match your ideal profiles. Start your free trial now to see for yourself!
