Two Sides of the Same Coin
How’s the relationship between your sales team and the marketing team at your company? Harmonious? Contentious? Maybe it’s just nonexistent?
Sales and marketing do have different perspectives on selling: Marketing focuses on reaching a wide audience, while sales seeks to create individual relationships. But even with the differing priorities, maintaining a healthy relationship between sales and marketing can help your organisation attract and keep customers. Conversely, friction between these two teams can hinder the development of the organisation as a whole.
In this lesson, you’ll learn more about the roles that sales and marketing play and what can happen when the teams aren’t aligned. You’ll also explore the best ways to create a collaborative environment between these two vital teams.
Watch the video to learn more about aligning your sales and marketing teams.
What Roles Do Sales and Marketing Play?
Traditionally, marketers develop leads—potential buyers—and hand them off for personal interaction with the sales team. The sales team then works to convert potential buyers into paying customers.
Compare sales and marketing in the table below.
| Sales | Marketing |
|---|---|
| Seeks to develop relationships | Seeks to develop a big-picture identity |
| Focuses on the individual buyer | Focuses on a wider audience |
| Emphasises short-term goals | Emphasises long-term goals |
Different Roles, Same Objective
While sales and marketing are distinct, they are also working toward the same objective: to land customers. To achieve that shared goal, alignment between marketing and sales is essential. Technology is giving customers more power in the buying process. Since potential customers can enter the sales process at any stage—and on their own terms—sales and marketing have to be in sync.
Collaboration, Not Competition
Marketing and sales rely on each other. A strategy that’s collaborative rather than competitive capitalises on the strengths, weaknesses, and insights of both teams.
Aligning sales and marketing has benefits that include:
- An improved customer journey. Harmonizing marketing and sales keeps your customer experience consistent.
- Better relationship development. Consistency informs prospective customers about what to expect from your organization.
- A more insightful view of your process. Marketing and sales are better equipped to assist each other at every point in the sales process.
- Increased revenue. Better alignment improves processes, which in turn increases both teams’ ability to turn prospective buyers into customers.
Where Sales and Marketing Meet
Integrating sales and marketing takes work but will yield positive results. Explore below to see where sales and marketing overlap and how you can make collaboration fruitful.
Responsibilities
Defining roles and responsibilities for both teams can help you move forward. Do you know how and why tasks are assigned to each team? Does everyone know whom to turn to for marketing or sales questions?
By clarifying responsibilities, each team will better understand the other’s perspective. That will allow them to navigate inquiries with more confidence and spend their time interacting with potential customers.
Terms
Consider how your organisation defines common terms. For example, how the marketing team views a “lead” may be vastly different from the sales team’s perspective. That can lead to miscommunication. Make sure you’re all working from the same foundational terms.
Goals
Sales and marketing departments should openly discuss shared and departmental goals. Many goals actually involve both sales and marketing, like customer retention and conversion rates. Some goals, like website visitors or quarterly sales, may be unique to each department.
When each team understands why these goals have been set, they can collaborate better. Sharing goals can also highlight any weak spots in processes, which can ultimately lead to better co-operative strategies.
Customer Experience
Consider your customer. They don’t view your departments separately—they only know what they experience when they encounter your organisation. Make sure both teams know who your customers are and the challenges they face.
Messaging
Establish consistent messaging throughout your marketing and sales efforts. Using different terms, stories, or ideas makes for a confusing and untrustworthy first impression.
Get marketing and sales on the same page. Unifying your message will clarify what customers can expect from your organisation as a whole.
Creating a Collaborative Environment
Aligning sales and marketing starts with creating a collaborative environment. A culture that values sharing, honesty, and integrity will encourage coordination between your teams.
Explore elements of a collaborative environment in the graphic below.
Establish Regular
Communication
Establish regular meetings between teams
to review progress, share updates, and
celebrate wins.
Share Information
Encourage members of your sales and
marketing teams to share data, stories, and
insights continuously.
Use the Same Tools
Choose software that accommodates
marketing and sales data so that teams can
work from the same dashboards and
databases.
Summary
Sales and marketing are distinctly different teams with a common goal: to turn potential buyers into current customers. Alignment is essential for organisations that want to optimise the abilities of these teams. Ultimately, the relationship between sales and marketing is most productive when viewed as a collaboration rather than a competition.
Sales and marketing must work together in overlapping aspects of business, including:
Responsibilities
Terms
Goals
Customer Experience
Messaging
A co-operative environment promotes integration between sales and marketing. And a company culture that prioritises collaboration sets up these two departments for success.
- Alignment between sales and marketing isn’t a one-time event. Plan for regular meetings and create ways for the teams to collaborate. Give each team a voice at every stage of your process.
Next, you’ll learn about some essential sales processes and concepts, beginning with the sales pipeline. Click on “Mark Complete ✓” to continue.