Collaboration Across Sales and Marketing Departments: The Key to Business Success

Remember group projects in high school or college? Often, these memories stir up feelings of frustration and dread, because it’s not always easy to work with a team on a single task.

Bad experiences aside, think back to a group project that went well. How did your team work together? What were the ingredients that lead to success?

Projects with group collaboration were almost always more successful than group projects that had a single productive person. The same can be said about work in the business world.

What exactly is collaboration in the workplace?

Collaboration in the workplace is when multiple people share ideas, think and work together to accomplish a common goal with better effectiveness than if they were to work alone. With collaboration, teamwork reaches new heights of productivity.  As a result, corporate morale is high, employees are able to solve problems and innovate faster, the work load is split and the organization has a shared vision and purpose. Collaboration puts an organization on the same path towards success.

There are numerous examples of tools in the workplace that facilitate collaboration, such as email, messenger, screen share, and conference lines. I’d suggest that sales enablement programs are another key tool that helps individuals and departments to collaborate.

Sales enablement is defined as a “strategic approach to unite stakeholders in sales, marketing, and operations around the common goal of providing salespeople with the right resources, processes, and technology needed to sell effectively.”

When an organization collaborates, the relationship between groups becomes more significant and effective. Collaboration in the workplace is about aligning sales enablement amongst all groups within the organization so all employees share a vision and purpose. Throughout the entire sales pipeline, including sales content, segments and territories, and marketing tools and functions, sales enablement is about aligning the organization’s vision by using collaboration.

Sales enablement equips salespeople with the knowledge of your most important marketing content, messaging, coaching, and subject matter experts throughout every step of the sales process.  It provides a “single source of truth”, or one location where sales managers, field reps, inside sellers, and trainers can go to find the most relevant content and coaching tips.

Collaboration is the key to business success; sales enablement is the secret sauce that aligns sales, ops, and marketing that makes it easier for these parts of the organization to collaborate.