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4 Tips to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams for Business Growth

Posted by Casey Lewis on Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Topics: Sales Process



align-sales-marketingYour sales and marketing teams are like the shortstop and second baseman on a baseball team: they operate independently but have the same goal in mind, and when they work in tandem, great things can happen. The problem is, they can also butt heads from time to time.

If you’ll indulge me in this baseball comparison a bit longer; to achieve financial success, the marketing team is like the second baseman fielding a double-play groundball – they’ve got to flip the ball (a lead) to the shortstop (sales) so they can turn the double play (convert the lead into a sale).

I apologize to those of you who don’t know baseball and didn’t understand the reference, but suffice to say these two groups need to work together to effectively drive sales. If they’re not working together, you’re not going to be able to maximize revenue for your business. So what can you do to make sure your second baseman and shortstop cooperate? Here are four tips. 

Schedule joint meetings

In almost every scenario in life, good communication is a positive. Gather your sales and marketing teams together on a regular basis for an informational meeting, so that each is aware of what the other is doing. Run down what’s happened since the last meeting, and what each group would like to accomplish before the next one. This is also an excellent opportunity to clear up any confusion or bring up any problems.

Invest in a CRM and allow universal access

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system is an excellent investment for any business, as it allows you to track your leads and your interactions with them. A CRM also gives you a central sales hub, where anyone can see your progress with a given lead. But it’s not enough to invest in the CRM – you’ve got to make sure your teams use it. Every interaction with a lead needs to be inputted into CRM, and both your sales and marketing teams need to be given access to it.

If you don’t have a CRM, we recommend using HubSpot’s new CRM system. Not only is it intuitive and efficient, it also allows you to take actions like send emails and make calls directly from a lead’s contact information page. This guarantees that all interactions with a lead are tracked and don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Coordinate your content

Marketing’s job is simple: get leads to sales. To accomplish this in inbound marketing, marketing will use blogs and content offers to engage the lead. Once the lead has been handed off to sales, a sales person might also want to incorporate some content offers as a way to increase the lead’s interest. Therefore, the two groups need to coordinate on the type of content each is going to want to use. Will marketing strictly be limited to blogs? What kind of content offers will be available to both departments? How do you ensure a lead is not given the same content offer twice? All of these things need to be considered and decided between the two departments. You need a strategy for what content will be used at what stage of a lead’s journey.

Give feedback on what works 

Again, this comes with solid communication. The marketing department knows what site visitors are interested in and the sales department knows what kind of leads are more likely to become sales. Trade that information with each other.

Marketing is on the forefront of the lead engagement process, so they see which content offers attract the most leads and what social media posts get the most action. They should share that information with sales so a sales person knows what kind of content or sales pitch is most likely to succeed with a lead.

Conversely, sales sees where the good leads are coming from. Are the best leads for your business men? Women? Young people? Business professionals? Stay-at-home moms? If sales can determine who your best leads are, marketing can then begin to tailor campaigns to reach that audience.

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