Although Sales and Marketing work closely together, they don’t always see eye to eye—whether in the metrics they’re tracking or the approaches they use. But that isn’t to say the teams should work in silos.
The age-old conflict between Sales and Marketing prevails only when businesses let it. In reality, marketing teams can add a lot of value to the sales process, and vice versa. But without aligning on mutual objectives, sharing knowledge, and processing feedback effectively, communication between Marketing and Sales can deteriorate, and it can feel like the teams are running in different directions or working in silos.
What sales teams really want and need from the marketing function is greater attention to how leads progress throughout the funnel and why, as well as insights into what might be creating friction in the sales process and how to fix it. By collaborating on companywide objectives and providing valuable sales enablement resources, Marketing can make bigger, more meaningful contributions to the company’s bottom line.
Align on revenue-driven targets
One of the most important opportunities for better collaboration between Sales and Marketing is better alignment on targets. When revenue is the overarching metric, it’s critical—not only for the health of the sales team but also for the overall health of the business—that Marketing strive for the same objectives as Sales does.
Inbound lead generation, in particular, can be a strong example of that. Within the marketing department, it’s common for individual targets to involve either Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) or Sales-qualified leads (SQLs). However, as those leads progress through the funnel, many of them drop out or they are disqualified, which results in fewer opportunities for Sales to close new customers and therefore generate revenue.
As a result, marketing teams can still have a largely successful quarter by generating a high quantity of leads even if sales are still a stretch away from the revenue target. But that success isn’t always felt across the company. That’s because the key driver of growth is revenue; without it, the company falls short.
In such instances, it would be beneficial for marketing teams to align more closely with and prioritize targets that have a more direct link to revenue. The best way marketing teams can aid Sales in that regard is to focus on lead quality rather than quantity.
That can be done in numerous ways, but the most efficient is to create stricter, more detailed qualification criteria for leads that better align with the people Sales actually manages to sell to and where the most revenue lies.
Also Read: Four Strategies to Successfully Unify Sales and Marketing
It’s also valuable for the marketing team’s quota and targets to include revenue targets in some way. Perhaps a portion of the team members’ bonuses could be contingent on the company’s meeting revenue targets, or marketing teams could be offered a commission for individual deals.
Create best-in-class sales enablement resources
Another area where marketing teams can add value for sales teams is to create and share exceptional sales enablement resources. Those can be shared directly with prospects to push them further along in their buyer journey or they can be used to better inform account executives (AEs) and business development reps (BDRs) when selling to certain personas.
However, what sales teams really need from Marketing is for case studies to cover a wide range of use cases and personas, ensuring that Sales can confidently showcase the value its product has for particular prospects.
Sales and marketing teams need to collaborate to identify resource gaps, and then reach out to customers that can bridge those gaps.
The same goes for competitor comparison pages. Although the marketing team can create plenty of direct-comparison pages that assist prospects and BDRs in understanding the nuanced differences between products, those will be useful to Sales only if the competitors it comes up against regularly in formal and informal discussions are covered comprehensively and as a priority.
The Way Forward
Marketing and Sales must collaborate to develop a strong feedback loop whereby discrepancies and challenges both departments encounter can be addressed quickly and efficiently, rather than being left to quarter’s end. Rather than waiting until the end of the quarter to review issues, marketing teams need to work with sales teams to flag and investigate problems as soon as they surface.
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