Constructive collaboration between teams is a vital component of success for any business. However, friction between departments and teams is a reality that all managers deal with. One of the most common intercompany rivalries is the one between sales and marketing. In fact, it’s estimated that a lack of sales and marketing alignment costs organizations 10% or more of annual revenue.
Fortunately, there are tried-and-true methods for improving relations between sales and marketing teams that can help improve conversion rates, shorten sales cycles, and ultimately boost the bottom line. What’s more, the right work management solution can make achieving and maintaining team alignment even easier.
Keep reading to learn some of our top team alignment tips and discover how Wrike can help close the gap between sales and marketing teams.
Why sales and marketing alignment matters
In the grand scheme of things, sales and marketing are trying to achieve the same thing: the acquisition and retention of clients or customers in order to drive revenue. However, these two teams play unique roles in the customer lifecycle, and when sales and marketing operate in silos and are disconnected from one another, companies suffer from wasted budget and resources and lost revenue.
By fostering sales and marketing alignment, these departments can work collaboratively to:
- Create more accurate buyer personas
- Develop more qualified leads
- Close more sales
- Share valuable customer feedback
- Design and execute a more strategic, well-rounded, and integrated marketing and sales strategy that boosts business growth
Improving the relationship between sales and marketing
While the benefits of sales and marketing alignment are clear, what’s less obvious is how organizations can best break down the walls that divide these departments and build a better relationship between sales and marketing teams. Here are some tips to help build camaraderie and collaboration between these often divided departments.
1. Meet, communicate, and interact regularly.
You can’t expect to have a cohesive, collaborative relationship between sales and marketing if the two teams never interact with one another. Consider establishing regular meetings between the two to share resources, processes, and best practices on a routine basis. To further strengthen team bonds, encourage informal relationship building outside the workplace, too, and be sure to relay the outcomes of your meetings to other relevant figures, such as the client project manager.
2. Collaboratively define your company’s ideal lead.
When marketing and sales teams aren’t aligned on precisely who their ideal prospect is, marketing efforts may go to waste while salespeople squander valuable time on unqualified leads. This is why it’s critical that sales and marketing come together to clearly define buyer personas and create targeted campaigns that speak directly to potential clients’ pain points.
3. Put a marketing content creation plan in place that leverages insight from sales.
It’s been reported that up to 70% of B2B marketing content never sees the light of day simply because the target audience doesn’t find the content topics relevant. That’s a massive waste of time and resources on the part of the marketing team.
By putting a system in place that allows salespeople to capture questions and comments from their interactions with qualified leads, you give your marketing team access to a treasure trove of valuable content ideas. Not only will this lead to more impactful, higher-converting marketing content, it will also save your company time and resources that were previously wasted on irrelevant content production.
4. Coordinate marketing and sales promotional efforts.
Just as sales and marketing can come together to create higher-quality, higher-converting content, the two teams should collaborate to brainstorm and develop specific promotions and campaigns.
5. Share marketing metrics and sales reports to better understand their relationship and refine marketing messaging.
Finally, when both teams can see exactly how team alignment (and a lack thereof) directly impacts both marketing KPIs and sales numbers, they’ll be more incentivized to work together to boost those outcomes. Luckily, the same tool that can help you capture new content, organize campaign ideas, and coordinate promotional efforts can also empower your efforts to easily share marketing and sales data with team members.
Ensure collaboration between teams with Wrike
With Wrike’s comprehensive work management platform, sales and marketing teams can easily communicate and collaborate to increase qualified leads, develop more targeted personas and campaigns, and ultimately improve bottom-line performance from both departments.
Wrike allows marketing teams to create editorial calendars and content marketing systems in which salespeople can capture and prioritize ideas. Additionally, marketing departments can utilize Wrike to solicit feedback from salespeople on campaigns in order to refine and sharpen messaging for maximum impact. Wrike also makes sharing sales reports and marketing metrics between departments a snap, so everyone can see what’s working and what can be improved upon.
Ready to see all the ways in which Wrike can enhance collaboration between sales and marketing? Give it a try for two weeks at no cost!
