Joy Happens when Sales, Marketing, and Customer Care Communicate

There is no sugar coating this. There is a disconnect between sales and marketing. I’ve seen it in every organization I’ve had the joy of working with thus far. When I speak with marketing folks, they admit it it’s there. That disconnect is, in my opinion, what keeps an organization from working efficiently and growing. By growing I mean increasing revenue.  

Early in my career, it seemed pretty obvious. I was marketing products and services, but I needed to make sure I was speaking the language of the customer in the content I was creating. I started meeting with sales and then I decided that I wanted to address customer pain points. I started meeting with customer care too. It happened naturally. And looking back, both groups were shocked but welcomed the engagement.

I wish I had actual data to report to you, and perhaps it’s something I’ll start researching on my own. But here’s what I experienced when I took that initiative and opened the pathways of communication between sales, marketing, and customer care.

1.    Messaging was cleaner, better. This engagement between sales, marketing, and customer care wasn’t just about those groups telling my marketing team what they were doing or what customers were saying. It was a conversation. We shared data, thoughts, and ideas. Every month, we went over upcoming campaigns. Engagements varied, but to start, they previewed the ads before they went live. This gave them the opportunity to either adjust their messaging when speaking with prospects and customers and also a voice on ways marketing could improve messaging too. It was a conversation, not a lecture.

2.    Communication between sales and marketing was transformative. I started integrated. sales and customer care with product folks and marketing (beyond search and social). It gave others a voice and that helped create more cohesive messaging across every customer facing platform.

3.    Marketing drove better-qualified leads. This happened almost instantly. I was running paid search and paid social. We had goals of increasing revenue for certain products and services for the quarter. Marketing created what WE thought were good ads and landing pages targeting who we thought were our targets. While we weren’t too far off base, we optimized ads and landing pages and our targets based on these open conversations with sales and customer care and viola. Marketing magic…or rather marketing joy! The feedback I got from sales was great and they closed more deals. Although I wasn’t responsible for closed-won deals, I did report on it as a KPI. I wanted to make sure that we were actually closing deals from social and search. It was a personal goal of mine to see sales succeed too.

4.    The customer experience improved. Because messaging wasn’t segmented and customer care was aware of all of our active campaigns and marketing efforts, they were better able to address customer issues. Since customer care was communicating with product marketing, issues were quickly addressed, and churn reduced. Imagine that! Better communication internally gave way to a better external customer experience.

It’s never too late to start this internal transformation within your organization. Start planting seeds now and talking to key stakeholders to make next year a completely integrated year. I challenge you to create open lines of communication with sales, marketing, and customer care so you too can grow your organization.