How do you get sales and marketing teams to work together?
I’m going to give you a few examples of how sales and marketing teams can work together – and common problems that stop this from happening.
You certainly need to get both teams together – not just the heads, but both teams. Look at the business together, doing a due diligence audit of it, even if you’ve been in the business for years. Have a fresh look at it, because there may have been a change of direction. Post-Covid, many businesses have had to change, adapting different techniques to retain business. This audit should take place with the owners, with targets fed back to the sales and marketing teams. Understand how you will meet those targets. Have you been operating in a stale market, with the same prospects and same clients? Perhaps you need to create new products, or new services, in order to harvest new returns.
It’s essential to do this due diligence with fresh eyes, looking at your business through a new customer’s eyes: what would you expect from your service or business based on your current marketing material?
At GMA we do this audit during our Discovery Sessions, discovering what makes businesses tick, their USPs, competitors, and the weak links in the chain. Models like Porter’s Five Forces are hugely advantageous here.
Why Your Website Matters
During this entire process, it’s vital to look at your current website. We talk about websites a lot, but there’s a reason: in the current year, the website is typically the thing prospects will see first; your shop window. Of all the due diligence audits we do at GMA, 9 out of 10 websites we see do not properly represent the business. We analyse businesses with powerful, market-leading USPs and competitive advantages, but their websites rarely reflect this.
Make sure you understand your business’s competitive advantages. We will discuss this in later blog pieces, but a USP and a competitive advantage are different things. While USPs are important, focus primarily on your advantages – what do you do better than your competitors? It could be availability, dispatch time, measurable product or service quality – it is not always cost.
If you do not feel like you have many competitive advantages, create some.
Plan Your Next Steps
Write a plan. Make this plan together, with both your sales and marketing team. This is important: if one team is not involved, you will lose valuable insight. Work as one combined unit, and you will find that after the exercise your relationship has already improved.
Make sure you’ve implemented 360 degree feedback. This is important. Did we mis-sell something? Are we underselling? Is it not clear where we fit into the market? Did the sales team engage a prospect quickly enough? Is there a flaw in our closing process? Any loss of opportunity from a marketing lead to sales is someone’s fault – but it is not necessarily the sales team’s fault, though many marketers will assume it is. It may be that the marketing did not reflect the product, for example.
Once you’ve gone through each step outlined here, you will find that future campaigns become much more powerful, and the improved link between sales and marketing pays off enormously.
How often do you fail your sales targets? When was the last time you were able to say you not only met your targets but exceeded them? Is your marketing approach fully integrated with your sales team, and do your sales team get the support they need from your marketing? We want to help you. Contact us for expert help to create and meet your business targets.
