Building a thriving partnership between sales & marketing

In the early days of my career, I spent plenty of time trying to get sales to follow up on the leads generated at tradeshows and events and through marketing campaigns I had driven. My experience was that sales often thought the purpose of marketing was to run events, create collateral and buy tchotchkes. Sound familiar?

The good news is that as digital marketing evolves, this trend is changing rapidly. In order to reduce costs and maximize profitability, businesses must modernize their sales and marketing to create a streamlined, integrated engine that attracts prospects and converts them into customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. I have worked in the tech space for over 20 years, 10 of which have been at Microsoft. Never have I seen a greater need or importance in sales and marketing coming together than now.

My #1 learning from the last year is this: Partnership is key

A year ago, I joined the Inside Sales team at Microsoft and took on a newly created role focused on leading the strategy for what we call Demand Response. Demand Response was set up as an inside sales motion to support Microsoft’s investment in digital marketing which we call the Global Demand Center.  One of my core responsibilities is to act as a central liaison with marketing to optimize our go to market strategy.

At Microsoft we use a plethora of tools to run our engine including CRM, marketing automation, lead scoring, machine learning, artificial intelligence and chatbots, just to name a few. In order to deliver the business results and growth that is expected and make sense of how these tools and processes come together, I have found that partnership must be the key priority.

3 tips on fostering partnership between sales & marketing

1. Foster a culture of trust and practice empathy. How many times have you said the words “The marketing/sales team doesn’t know what they are doing?” It is time to get away from the blame game, reach across the aisle and build a trusting, positive relationship. I believe this starts with having empathy for your sales and marketing partners. Acknowledge that sales and marketing are difficult in today’s crowded, noisy space and that we are all on a learning journey moving towards continuous improvement.
2. Create feedback loops and processes to gather and discuss input from all levels of the organization. Each month I sit down with my marketing counterparts, sales leaders from across the business and individual sellers to gather feedback on what is going well, what is not working, and help needed. We then collate this feedback and share it back with the teams that support us to ensure we are driving continuous improvement.  
3. Create and regularly review and discuss shared metrics. One of the things we did at the start of this fiscal year was come together and establish a set of shared metrics and goals that we would use to gauge performance and define what success looked like. Each month we review these metrics as a team and discuss opportunities for improvement.

What is your top tip for fostering partnership between sales and marketing? Please let me know your thoughts by commenting below!