Sales and Marketing: 3 Key Ingredients To Making A Unified Team

Do you still view marketing and sales as two separate departments? Are your two teams stuck in a battle of blame when a campaign doesn’t deliver the desired results? Avoid the blame game and instead create cross-functional teams with three key ingredients.

Unifying Marketing And Sales Teams To Generate Stronger Customer Relationships

Like a marinade that has three key ingredients, so too must your recipe for unifying marketing and sales teams have a few crucial components.

1. Collaboration. — Your marketing and sales teams must learn to collaborate often and effectively. Marketing and sales should no longer be viewed as separate funnels. In fact, in an era where content marketing “makes or breaks” a company, it is even more important that the marketing pieces are relevant to the sale of products or services. Bringing together sales and marketing teams to brainstorm ideas that resonate strongly with prospects is the first step in creating a collaborative environment that will generate stronger B2C and B2B relationships.
2. Clearly Establish Roles. — Marketing should be viewed as a content creation entity, while sales should provide lessons learned and the distribution engine needed to reach audiences. In order to generate high-value content that resonates with prospects, marketers need to learn from the insights that sales teams gather on a daily basis. Additionally, marketing content is only as good as the distribution channels that it can leverage. In short, by clearly establishing roles, marketers and sales associates can effectively work together to create and distribute dynamic content that motivates the intended audience to make a purchase.
3. Create Feedback Channels. — Knowing the impact of a campaign is equally important to both marketers and sales teams; and yet, more often than not the two entities never get together to discuss the impact of campaigns. By creating feedback channels, you can more easily capture the quantitative and qualitative data needed to effectively analyze your campaign. Once the data is gathered, both teams should meet to examine the results, discuss lessons learned, and once more collaborate to generate new ideas. Through feedback channels your teams can become unified as successes are highlighted, failures discussed, and an improved campaign is created.

The moral of the story is clear, while “marketing” and “sales” might be viewed as two different teams, the departments need to be unified if they are to achieve the optimal results. Through collaboration, clearly established roles, and feedback channels, marketing and sales can effectively join forces to deliver the all-important content that prospects require before becoming valued customers.