Integrate Sales and Marketing to Drive Revenue

Sales and marketing are two separate disciplines and often within companies these are two separate departments each with its own department head. They often have different visions of how to move the business forward arrived at in a vacuum, no cooperation between the two. Each works to their own set of KPIs.

Sales teams are often of the belief that marketing is out of touch with what customers really want or more importantly are interested in. Marketing believes sales has a narrow vision and only focus on what they are comfortable with and are not open to change. Unfortunately, to a degree both are correct, but are also part of the problem. If Marketing gets negative feedback but nothing to work with to make adjustments, they consider it simply whining from the sales team. If Marketing never asks for feedback, then sales are correct in their belief Marketing does not operate in the real world.

When they work together Marketing primes the target market by creating brand awareness, alerting the target markets to the benefits of using the products or services, creates a call to action and in this way shortens the sales cycle and makes the salespersons job easier.

Sales, while their job becomes easier or at least better targeted, does not get a free pass either. There must be a feedback loop, what worked well, what generated interest, what needed tweaking. Sales should not just take marketing's messaging and use it blindly then come back and say it did not work.  

One client I worked with in the past had a new packaging product that was a replacement for Styrofoam. The marketing department was advertising it as a green product and felt that being green would be the key selling point. Our business development found that the businesses we called agreed green was important to their company but that did not wind up leading to sales. Internally within the sales department we made a small adjustment to the messaging. Instead of telling them they would be using a green product we explained they could advertise they were a green company and that would help their brand image. When we made that change the sales results improved. Providing this real-world information to the marketing department allowed them to adjust what they were doing to drive both more and better leads.  

Generating revenue and growth are the common goals of the sales and marketing functions. If marketing generates interested potential clients with a high probability of becoming clients or customers it has done its job regardless of how many page views it generated or how long visitors remain on the website.

 Sales primary and most important function is to close sales whatever the origin of the lead. However, sales use of a good CRM can create a buying persona and overview of pertinent benefits that interest buyers that can then be used by marketing to help plan their next campaigns. Referrals are always the best source of new business but a close second should be a well targeted lead from Marketing's efforts.

From an article on Outfunnel “According to a recent study, revenue growth is 70% more common in B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing.” Are you hitting your revenue growth goals? Are your sales and marketing teams working hand in glove to drive that revenue? Do they meet together regularly? Do they have shared KPIs? Are they concentrating on the same market or products? These are all important questions and if the answer is not yes you may want to rethink your process.