How can the sales team make marketing more effective? As we wrote last week, a stronger relationship between sales and marketing can improve the customer experience and your company’s bottom line. Unfortunately, many businesses do not foster teamwork between marketing and sales, and the two groups may not ask each other for the information they need most.
Marketers: it’s time to start a conversation with sales about your needs. Start asking your sales team for the following:
What are prospects and customers saying in the field? What do they want and need? Sales staff speak directly to leads daily, while marketers rarely do. The sales team learns what closes deals, and conversely, what issues are deal breakers. Marketers have access to a wealth of customer data, but it can be used in even more powerful ways when paired with first-hand customer insights from sales.
If you don’t already have an effective CRM system in place, it’s time to band together with your sales team and talk to your company’s leadership about implementing one. When used correctly, a high-functioning CRM will provide both teams with clean, usable documentation of sales and marketing’s impact on leads at every stage of the sales cycle.
If your CRM isn’t capable of tracking every interaction with a lead, from their visits to your website and their interactions with your emails to their conversations with sales reps, it’s time to look for a better solution that will truly help you close the loop between marketing and sales. Marketo, Act-On, Pardot and HubSpot paired with Salesforce are a few of our preferred solutions.
Conversations about sharing lead intelligence and improving CRM systems will go nowhere unless you first foster a truly collaborative relationship between sales and marketing. To begin making this kind of relationship a reality, you should plan to regularly check in with sales and discuss how your teams can better serve each other’s needs. When you do, make sure you’re providing something of value to the sales team, not just asking for the data and insights you need to strengthen your own work. Marketing/Sales collaboration is a two-way street. Improved collaboration between your two groups will grow over time as your teams see just how much they have to offer each other.
Read our upcoming posts to learn more about the marketing metrics that set up sales success and get more tips on establishing better communications between sales and marketing.
Photo credit: Xataka via Flickr Creative Commons
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