What Happens When Sales & Marketing Work Together

“There is no question that, when Sales and Marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.” Harvard Business Review

Proper alignment between sales and marketing could lead to a staggering jump in marketing revenue, as well as higher win rates and better customer retention.

I have witnessed this pattern in many companies over the years and it remains my quest to resolve it :-)

Sales and Marketing alignment won’t just fall into place overnight. Here are three levels you should crack first before those two functions start working truly effectively together:

1. The Emotional Level: Your Sales and Marketing teams should be tight and have each other’s backs. You’re trying to build a “best friends” relationship, not a “brother-sister” relationship.
2. The Process Level: There need to be clear, repeatable processes in place to ensure that everyone within both teams is pulling in the same direction and working in the same way.
3. The Feedback Loop Level: Marketing doesn’t always produce great leads; they might not always get the messaging spot on. They’re only human, they can mess up. So can sales. So it’s important that a feedback loop exists between the two teams. Maybe the salesperson says, “You got really awesome customers from here. How do we get more of those?” Or vice versa, “These customers really, really suck, can you please not bring any more of those in?” Both are very important.

How to get them working together: It’s all well and good to state the benefits of getting your sales and marketing teams to collaborate, but you also need to know?how?to get them to work together effectively. I will come back to that in an article soon.

Some sources:

• https://hbr.org/2006/07/ending-the-war-between-sales-and-marketing
• https://sujanpatel.com/marketing/sales-marketing-can-work-together/