At one time, marketing and sales departments were responsible for approximately equal portions of the buyer’s journey. Marketers handled top-of-funnel activities such as raising awareness, building buzz, and generating demand. Sales would step in for bottom-funnel tasks like lead qualification, answering questions, making offers, and eventually closing the deal.
Today’s marketing strategies are much more revenue-driven than ever before, and therefore marketing is responsible for a larger share of the funnel — as high as 75%, according to Sujan Patel. While marketers still drive awareness, they also find, nurture, and qualify leads, attributing revenue to each campaign. Sales teams still take leads across the finish line, but they enter the picture when clients are almost ready to purchase. And that’s assuming marketing wasn’t able to close the deal already.
Marketing and sales departments are both vital to an organization’s growth — that much hasn’t changed. Companies still need creative minds to attract leads with engaging campaigns and sales specialists who work directly with clients to close a deal. The problem is that marketing now handles several responsibilities that sales managed as recently as five years ago, and many businesses haven’t adapted to this dynamic. At best, this can contribute to communication breakdowns between departments. At worst, it leaves salespeople feeling like their work isn’t valued.
The good news is that CMOs are in a prime position to resolve these obstacles and create more synergy between sales and marketing teams.
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Remove any communication barriers
According to one study, almost 60% of marketers think they know what information salespeople need, but only 35% of salespeople agree. What’s interesting is this discrepancy takes two forms. In the first, marketers truly aren’t listening to content ideas or feedback from sales. In the second, marketing is producing content for sales — but salespeople aren’t aware the assets exist.
In both circumstances, a lack of communication is the most common obstacle that prevents an effective working relationship. As another example, when marketers design content for salespeople, 55% of marketers have no idea which assets they’ll use to close a deal. How much time are marketing departments wasting on case studies or pitch decks that customers will never see?
There are several factors contributing to the miscommunication. To start, many companies silo their departments to increase efficiency, severing useful connections in the process. Historically speaking, sales and marketing teams were also known to have adversarial working relationships. It wasn’t unusual to see finger-pointing between groups whenever performance was down. Unfortunately, this behavior leads to deadlocks that prevent others from fixing the problem.
The solution usually lies in collaboration. When you create opportunities for marketers and salespeople to share their perspectives, their leaders will be better equipped to address the issues.
Facilitate collaboration
Sales and marketing teams should be in near-constant communication. CMOs can host a weekly review to discuss performance, seek feedback, and generally align the efforts of both departments toward a shared goal. Executives representing both teams should take part in these meetings — usually the CMO and CRO — but it’s a good idea to have directors take part as well. Depending on your organizational structure, invite any heads of demand generation, PR, communications, and content who have a stake in sales or marketing.
Whoever attends these meetings, always ground the conversation with data. Between sales and marketing, there should be in-depth pipeline reports that can answer the following questions in granular detail:
- What types of deals are closing?
- What types of deals occur most frequently?
- How much revenue are we earning?
- What LTV projections can we expect from different customer segments?
- What regions are deals coming from?
- Which verticals are leads coming from?
- And most importantly, where are we falling short?
Keeping the focus on these KPIs does more than center the conversation. It can also inspire creative solutions and makes it easier to measure progress over time.
Build your strategy together
The recent push towards revenue-driven marketing sometimes makes it seem like marketing is responsible for creating strategy while sales merely executes it. This belief couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Marketers conduct extensive research of markets, create target personas, audit competitor’s positioning, and much more. But one cannot overlook the insights sales gains by working directly with customers and leads. Salespeople are on the frontlines of customer interactions, listening to their needs and understanding any pain points. They know exactly how customers will use products, what features they will ignore, and which pricing tiers will be the most effective.
From a revenue-driven perspective, this knowledge is invaluable to long-term growth. To that end, sales and marketing teams need to collaborate when it comes to strategy. Marketers will conduct the initial market research, sales will provide feedback, and the two will refine their process into something that accomplishes more than they could ever do apart.
Consistent growth is only possible when both sides work together to achieve their goals. The good news is once you strike that balance, there’s nothing they cannot accomplish.