Do Your Sales and Marketing Teams Work Together?

When you think of the ideal team, everyone’s working together in perfect harmony toward a common goal, right?  Think about your favorite sports team and the most recent championship they won.

It doesn’t matter what the team or the sport is.  Sure, they had some talent.  But, it took a ton of working together for them to achieve their goal too.

If you’re a fan of any professional sport, you can probably think of at least a couple teams with all the talent in the world who performed far below expectations.

Maybe you’ve had some of these experiences personally in your own life.

It’s Difficult to Get Your Sales and Marketing Teams on the Same Page – Here’s Why

Now, business gets much more complex than professional sports.  Instead of a handful of people working together to achieve a goal, you have 50, 100, 1000, or maybe even more.

You have multiple teams attempting to work together.  In the case of sales and marketing, they have different goals to reach.

Your sales reps have the goal of closing as many deals as possible.  If they don’t, they lose their jobs.  If the lead isn’t ready to buy fairly soon, sales reps are not overly concerned with them.

Marketing doesn’t need people ready to buy.  To your marketing team, they’ve done their job if they get someone highly interested in your content, visiting your landing pages, or commenting on your social media profiles.  But this interest does not equate to readiness to buy.

Does the prospect engaging with all these marketing materials have the budget or authority available to make a decision?  Hard to say.

Marketing looks at this lead and says, “This is a qualified lead.  Pass them on to sales.”

Then sales talks to the lead, finds out they have no ability to purchase, and pushes them into the “follow-up” pile.

So, sales and marketing get frustrated and angry with each other.  Marketing pros say “sales is being too picky” and sales accuses marketing of not passing them leads ready to buy.

What can You Do?  Agree on KPIs and Develop a Process

Someone at your organization has to get both departments to agree on these two important factors.  For example, you might take one of those leads who’s not ready to buy, categorize them according to where they are in the buy cycle, and then send them relevant content that nurtures where they’re at in the purchase process.

Sales can discard the lead for now and follow up in a few months.  Maybe the company’s circumstances have changed, and then the prospect will be ready to buy.  During that time, the prospect could have been promoted to a new position where they have the authority to make a decision.

However you decide to define your KPIs and process, both departments understand their responsibilities and can work together to make your company more successful.

There’s no right or wrong way to develop KPIs and processes.  The important point is you figure out what works for your company.