Just returned from a industry summit, and it was a blast. Yet, it highlighted a persistent challenge: the critical need for teamwork in sales and marketing teamwork.
The familiar narrative of misaligned marketing and sales teams swapping complaints is all too common, and frankly, it’s a narrative we need to change.
Addressing the Problem
The gap between marketing and sales departments is costing companies millions in wasted opportunities. Despite having stellar lead generation programs, the lack of teamwork in sales and marketing teamwork can derail even the most promising campaigns.
Solution Introduction
To bridge this divide, it’s essential to cultivate daily teamwork in sales and marketing, far beyond the occasional planning meetings. At markempa, we’ve developed a unique approach to foster marketing teamwork through what we call ‘huddles’.
Huddle Details
Our huddles are short, focused meetings between the sales and marketing teams, held daily and weekly, designed to enhance teamwork in sales. These sessions are built around three core actions: Talk. Understand. Execute. This simple yet powerful loop encourages marketing teamwork and ensures everyone is aligned and moving forward together.
Broadening Collaboration
Collaboration is crucial for effective sales and marketing teamwork, and huddles are just one way to achieve it. Apart from huddles, teams can share insights and best practices, jointly develop strategic plans, and explore additional avenues for collaboration. These efforts contribute to stronger teamwork between sales and marketing.
Maintaining a collaborative environment requires daily interactions and strategies. It’s important to ensure that teams are communicating regularly and effectively. This helps to foster a sense of shared responsibility, and encourages everyone to work towards common goals.
Sharing successes is also essential for improving collaboration. By celebrating wins and highlighting best practices, teams can learn from each other and continuously improve their performance.
Enhancing Teamwork Through Huddles
During our huddles, we focus on several key activities to foster better collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Here’s how we break it down:
Customer Understanding and Communication
- Get feedback from the sales team – look at the conversion process and have regular face-to-face meetings or conference calls.
- Seek to understand if the sales team is at capacity. Don’t generate more leads if they are focused on closing deals.
- Encourage salespeople to follow-up on leads and hold them accountable, while still treating them like customers.
- Remember what Steven Covey says, “seek first to understand. Then be understood.”
- Mutually share new insights gained from customer feedback.
- Discuss common concerns raised by potential customers and how the sales team is addressing them and develop solutions together.
Strategy and Planning
- Develop a strategic lead generation and growth plan between sales and marketing.
- Be flexible in your planning, so that you can adapt to changing requirements.
- Assign revenue goals to your joint sales and marketing plan.
- Go over the upcoming lead generation program strategy and what the outcomes of that strategy are expected to be.
- Jointly develop message map and value proposition for your lead generation program.
- Map out your customer’s decision and buying process and then map out your value proposition for each role involved in the buying process.
Process Improvement and Best Practices
- Marketing and sales can work together on standardizing and documenting their lead generation and sales process.
- Centralize the lead qualification process.
- Share lead generation best practices amongst the sales team.
- Develop a culture that values leads by creating a universal lead definition.
- Close-the-loop on each sales lead being generated.
- Define and map out the responsibilities shared by both sales and marketing.
- Does your lead generation messaging align with your target audience’s needs?
Collaboration and Support
- Use team huddles to introduce team members.
- Develop a marketing program that helps the sales team sell at a personal level.
- Train your salespeople on how to optimize your lead generation investment and provide feedback.
- Get the marketing team out in the field with the sales team regularly.
- Arrange your compensation so there’s shared accountability around lead generation.
- See that marketing takes over as many of the non-selling tasks as possible.
- Integrate sales and marketing activity by using the same database or CRM system.
Insight and Analysis
- Share details about upcoming events, articles, and press coverage.
- Share effectiveness measurements from recent lead generation activities.
- Analyze competitive information, and develop a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis.
- Ask, what have you learned from the leads? Are there changes in hot topics for your target audience?
- Improve the relevance of sales tools and marketing materials with sales input.
- Determine an answer to the question: What is the life cycle of a lead?
