Get sales and marketing walking hand-in-hand

It’s well known both parties benefit if sales and marketing work together. Clare Lawson, managing partner at OgilvyOne, offers six tips on making it happen

If we had a pound for every time a marketing director has asked how to integrate their sales and marketing functions, we would, at last count, have £274. The findings from our recent B2B Marketing Leaders Survey suggest the solution to this thorny issue is still not an easy one to find. Ninety per cent of marketers surveyed suggested it was a general concern or in their top three issues. With marketing budgets tight and sales targets high, the question is how can you integrate these two key business functions to prove they really are better together. Like it or not, it is down to you to make them walk hand-in-hand.

1. Listen

Firstly let’s think about planning sales and marketing campaigns. The conversations your sales teams are having with prospects and customers are one of your most valuable insights. Forget focus groups and simulated research, the customer conversations that occur all day every day are by far the most powerful messaging tool in your business. Yes, we should all be speaking the same language but the dialect of the sales people is what your customers understand. Listen to their terminology, understand the problems they are trying to solve for your customers. Those are the insights that should drive your marketing proposition and execution. Refine them by all means using traditional research methods, but plan your campaigns based upon real customer insight.

2. Agree what makes a lead

There will always come a point where a lead or prospect that has been wooed by the marketers campaign will need to be passed into a one-to-one conversation with a sales person. But what constitutes a lead, how is it ranked? All too often this basic categorisation is the undoing of sales and marketing integration. The best examples we have found are the simplest. A five-point scale, where one is being aware of a brand; two is showing interest in their service through engaging with an email or communication; three is showing a desire to learn more, downloading content or completing a survey. This engaged customer represents a lead, we know enough about their background and their motivations to get into a one-to-one relationship. Four is a qualified lead and five is a hot prospect. Agreeing the hand off point between three and four, and agreeing what customer engagement tactics and levels are involved in each stage keeps everyone on the same path. It also avoids the conversation of marketing providing leads sales don’t value.

3. Create a collective agenda

Never approve a campaign calendar that shows the above-the-line and below-the-line activity on a timeline but doesn’t indicate the lead nurture and sales activity that follows it. At worst it’s an administrative step that forces marketing and sales to talk, at best it’s the way to consolidate plans and ensure resources are aligned against the same messages, time periods, and goals. And remember it’s a course to navigate not a march to be completed as quickly as possible.

4. Steal your USPs from sales

When you get to the point of campaign execution, don’t just use the sales teams’ insight to drive the campaign proposition, make sure your points of substantiation are taken directly from the sales teams top selling messages. They know what customer benefits are resonating better than a marketer. However, there is one small trap you should avoid, it’s called sales backwash. Don’t allow the sales closing arguments to be replicated in prospecting communications. There is a difference between an invite to the party and a minute-by-minute agenda of the entertainment on offer. That’s the point where you have to celebrate your differences.

5. Work your content

Content now plays a significant role in educating and inspiring a prospect base. Particularly in long B2B purchase decisions, seeding the right information or the right functionality to a prospect or customer can give them a better empathy with your brand than advertising alone. In creating that content, ensure your brief is to make it work for sales as well as marketing. A great example here is the Nissan Service Cloud Demo, (take a look on YouTube). The Nissan mobile app that helps a Nissan owner get advice or tips on how to manage issues with their car is a great marketing tool. But the same tool links to the sales persons CRM system, meaning sales automatically know who is searching for advice or support – and they can then interject the conversation to drive a better service experience. The same content, looked at from two different angles integrates the marketing and sales support for Nissan.

6. Share goals

Finally, and perhaps most obviously, measure the same things. It’s a well held prophecy that KPIs are self fulfilling. If you share the same metrics, you focus on the same things, you come across each other in the corridor, and you talk about how you are collectively doing against the current targets. A human touch, you might say, to get sales and marketing paddling in the same direction.

Yes there are other factors in play. An organisation’s culture, its willingness to share and its desire to see marketing and sales as a continuum. But if you get started with some of these suggestions, you’ll hopefully be surprised at how in-step you really are.

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