In honor of Valentine’s Day, make like Cilla Black and set your marketing and sales teams up on a date, suggests Howard Lewis, director of business solutions for Experian
It’s the time of the year when florists and card shops are stocking up and restaurants are increasing their menu prices as they look forward to benefitting from happy ‘loved-up’ couples. However, healthy relationships are not only good for the card shops and restaurants. When it comes to your business, a happy, respectful and mutually appreciative bond between sales and marketing will reap benefits in abundance.
For many businesses this would be a significant change from the way sales and marketing teams – sometimes uncomfortable bedfellows – have historically operated. As it is, the benefits of bringing together the sales and marketing teams and creating a harmonious marriage are vast.
Here are some values to adhere to for a match made in heaven.
Ensure the sales teams are bought into all plans and that their input is respected. In more progressive organisations, marketers work directly with their sales colleagues to generate campaign ideas. After all, it’s the sales team that has the most customer contact and awareness of market condition that campaigns can address.
Implementing schemes that recognise when salespeople have gone out of their way to collaborate with marketing is a valuable tool for promoting more joined-up working.
Campaign testing can be vital in identifying the operational requirements of a campaign. Running campaigns past sales teams before launch can pick out any issues with messaging and identify opportunities where the campaign can be tailored for a specific audience or adapted for a new one.
Getting members of the marketing team to visit clients alongside account managers can provide priceless understanding of the audience they seek to communicate with. It also provides another opportunity for marketing to work closely with sales, and helps them to understand the barriers they have to overcome in order to win business.
By working NPS, or an alternative customer satisfaction research system into relationships with clients, you can not only make sure customers are getting the products they need but they are also getting the level of service they want from the sales and support teams. Although it could uncover negative feedback, this constructive criticism is essential for a business to ensure customer satisfaction, contributing to higher renewal rates and cross selling/up selling opportunities. Research which system will best fit your business needs.
Sales tools are vital and marketing teams need the valuable insight sales teams have to offer in order to make them as effective as possible. With a marketing and sales team working together, there is more likelihood that all the information being supplied in product sheets and case studies is relevant and useful. Are the USPs identified? Is a direct comparison to competitor products included?
Marketing can often be the ‘connect’ between field sales agents and the team back in the office. We’re seeing more and more marketers identifying a great opportunity for new products, which is then fed back to the sales teams. A close relationship between marketing and sales results in everyone being on the lookout for opportunities meaning the marketing team are just as ‘hungry’ as the sales team and, in turn, the sales team understands the importance of the customer journey and ongoing customer satisfaction.
Last, but not least, and what might be the most challenging – turning your enemies into effective colleagues. The biggest detractors of marketing in a sales team often turn into the biggest advocates. Through confronting issues in the sales team and educating them around the way marketing works, specifically to key individuals who influence opinion in the team, it is possible to build improved relations with sales. These relationships take a lot of work and can sometimes need delicate nurturing, but pay dividends in the long run and are often the source of great campaign ideas and incentives.
