CREATING SYNERGIES IN SALES & MARKETING (PART-1)

Often enterprises make the most major business mistake of making sales & marketing departments function in isolation. Even though both play decisive roles in the customer journey, they are highly disconnected & non-transparent. This silo attitude not only debilitates their business growth but, in a way, weakens customer experience as well.

Sales & marketing both share almost identical fundamental goals: acquiring & retaining customers and driving business revenue; still, many companies have a real challenge in aligning their processes and synergizing their operations. However, according to CSO Insights, companies with dynamic and adaptable sales and marketing processes have achieved 10% more targets than other companies.

There are three ways for CMOs to make these two units work in perfect tandem & create synergy so that they can contribute lifelong value to the company:

1. Define Stage

2. Alignment Stage

3. Analyze Stage

1. DEFINE STAGE

Companies should adopt ‘good fence, good neighbours’ positioning. Before establishing a common language between the two departments, senior management needs to have a clear understanding of the fundamental functional differences. This understanding should be communicated internally, which will help in defining the roles and some basic guidelines to avoid disputes. Since this sort of communication is not going to happen on its own, the management needs to establish a forum for the information to be exchanged. Such platforms should not only focus on resolving differences but identifying & strategizing towards achieving common goals:

Identify Potential Customers?

Companies rely heavily on the marketing department in defining the buyers' persona and accordingly shaping the outreach campaigns, messaging, communication channels etc., and the sales team is perceived to be the last leg in the journey of acquiring & repeating customers. To fill up this gap, marketing & sales teams can together identify ideal buyers or customers for their product or service based on data & research.

Marketing team should take valuable insights from the Sales team about the customer experience since they are the ones gaining daily feedback from them in the field. This will help them establish common communication messages that will be properly communicated to the common buyers

Establish Expectations?

Marketing & sales teams are co-dependent and collaborate on various platforms in order to achieve higher goals, i.e., enrich leads & revenue generation. Still there always lie opportunities to improve the channels to communicate better of what they believe they need but not getting. In order to create a healthy relationship, both teams need to be educated about each other's world, their individual goals, KPIs, processes etc. This can be achieved by including them in their internal meetings, customer calls etc. for better assistance in closing the leads.

Such initiatives will open up avenues for better sales & marketing synergy.

In my experience, defining an ideal lead is the most crucial step. First, sales and marketing need to come together to identify an ideal customer persona as per their role in the buying committee - decision-maker, influencer, end-user, executive-sponsor, legal & finance, among others. Then, once there is an agreement on the ideal lead, it is essential to break it down further into demographics and other relevant segments to establish clear goals and expectations. Some of the marketing projects that I have executed have been successful because I worked closely with Sales to define an ideal customer. 

The marketing team will have a better understanding in deciding the sources, content, offers, and based on the marketing data sources, the sales team will have a clear insight of which category of buyers should they be approaching for lead generation. In fact, data provided by CRM & integrated marketing initiatives can be great sources to synergize marketing & sales teams' efforts.

Define Marketing-Sales Funnel

One of the reasons for the long-standing division between sales & marketing teams is that they both follow their individual funnels to achieve the common goal. Their goal is to direct prospects from the unaware-to-lead-to-customer, moving them from the top to the bottom of the funnel. To achieve this, it requires a thoroughly developed strategic plan for each stage of the funnel to yield the desired results. If both the departments are working towards this common goal, there's no reason there should not be a single combined funnel representing the scale of marketing & sales stages. In the digital era, the cross-sell or upsell goal is quite popular, having the product available at every step of the buyer's journey.

Read my second blog in this series here.