Sales and marketing, in every company, are working towards the same goal. To help their company grow. So how come that 87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative?
If this also happens to your organization, a friendly warning:
This needs to stop. Now.
According to a Harvard Business Review research, “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”.
With the number of information customers receive nowadays, they will not tolerate any gap between your two departments. When a customer engages with your social media (a tweet, a blog post, etc.), the last thing he or she needs is your sales representative calling up and presenting something completely different -either it’s your product or your whole company policy.
Where can this lead?
Sales are disappointing. Marketing blames sales for the poor execution of a well-thought plan. Sales blame marketing for using too much of the budget and for being out of touch with customers. And so on and so on.
Sounds familiar right? Well, the only outcome is: Hurting your company’s performance.
How can Sales and Marketing work together?
1. Transparency is the king.
As a manager, you need to understand the conflict and work toward a mutual agreement and effective communication. Weekly meetings might sound boring but it’s the best way to make sure there is transparency between departments. Keep meetings casual and encourage your teams to discuss anything that comes up.
2. Educate!
According to a Harvard Business Review article run back in 2006, “Marketers […] are highly analytical, data-oriented, and project focused. They’re all about building competitive advantage for the future. […] Salespeople, in contrast, spend their time talking to existing and potential customers. They’re skilled relationship builders […] they want to keep moving”.
Explain the mutual benefits of their collaboration and educate them on what the other team is doing.
3. Rotate jobs
And what’s the more effective way for marketing to understand sales and vice versa? Job rotation. This will make them more familiar with each other’s ways of thinking and working. Sales can help marketing come up with alternative content since they have the first-hand experience with the clients’ needs. Marketing, on the other hand, can listen closely to phone calls in order to develop better solutions for customers while conducting deeper research.
These are just a few ways for your sales and marketing team to work together and challenge customers’ thinking. Does your company have a different strategy? How effective do you find it to be? To find out more about sales and marketing collaboration in the chemicals industry, join the 2019 Chemicals Sales and Marketing Toolbox in Frankfurt.