Marketing and sales collaboration for business pleasure and profit

The goal of B2B marketing and sales is increasing revenue. 

Still, if you’ve been around industries long enough, you’d swear in some places that relationship is, at best, dysfunctional, at worse, caustic.   

Both teams are eager to show their worth to the company, key stakeholders, leadership, and, in most cases, each other. Yet, all too often, they rarely align on how to achieve their mutually aligned goals. Sometimes, this is prevalent within their teams if you have old guard versus new guard or [shudders] the we’ve-always-done-it-this-way-itus.

Worse case scenarios include leadership having a hands-off “why don’t you two figure it out” approach. If we’re honest, good leadership would step in and start talks to fix such a situation, but bosses, more concerned with themselves, let teams and people suffer. If your organization needs to up its leadership game, I know a person.

Marketing and sales, like most couples, without communication, are a divorce waiting to happen. Only, in this case, it’s one of those relationships that soldiers on; bitterness and division deepen. 

Without communication, the family (company) and the children (customers) suffer — everyone suffers.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

While there often are differences in marketing and sales workflows, ultimately, there are overlaps in what the teams desire and how to work together, creating alignment for strategic success. 

Let’s dive in exploring some issues first, starting, as usual, with data.

Lack of communication between B2B sales and marketing

Though I’ve deeper implementation and actionable strategies that applied to make organizations more happy and profitable, in purely general terms:

Marketing focuses on:

• Top of lead funnel
• Segmentation
• Campaign metrics
• Brand awareness

Sales focuses on:

• Quota attainment
• Accounts
• Deal closing
• Tightening sales cycles 

Numbers provided by Demandbase reveal some truths:

Marketing wants from sales:

• Better lead followup: 34%
• Consistent use of systems: 32%
• Feedback on campaigns: 15%
• Use messaging and tools provided by marketing: 13%

Sales wants from marketing

• Higher lead quality: 55%
• More lead quantity: 44%
• Competitive information: 39%
• Lead nurturing: 37%

More mind-numbingly facts when it comes to collaboration:

• 44% of sales executives say they meet with marketing peers less than quarterly
• 42% of marketing professionals say they meet weekly with their sales counterparts
• 40% feel the other department disconnects from metrics and goals

According to MraketingProfs, when marketing and sales are on the same page, there are:

• 36% higher customer attention,
• 38% higher win rates, and
• 25% faster growth.

The fix is all in communications: Both human collaboration and the tech stack.

If it IS broke, fix it

Businesses are relationships, the most important of which is people talking to people.

Humans gonna human. Start by getting everyone from marketing and sales, especially those on their leadership, in the same room. That room can easily be virtual or in person; that doesn’t matter in 2023, but being able to see each other and collaborate with an agenda is.

If it helps, if there are grievances to air in a Festivus way, have at it. Once out of the way, have marketing and sales discuss their values. The sales and marketing team’s values should align with your brand’s core values. If your organization doesn’t have brand values, you have more significant issues, and maybe we need to talk.

Sales and marketing have goals that, on paper, align with the above, where marketing is trying to build a brand and create conversions providing leads to sales. Meanwhile, sales want quality leads in their pipeline. 

Both of these are creating opportunities for the organization; what’s at issue, perhaps, is how they frame these concepts from their POV, but often when discussed out in the open, they — sales and marketing — will have the revelation they are not so different from one another.

Once you create a sort-of kumbaya or at least mutual understanding between sales and marketing at the same table (again, virtually or otherwise), you can proceed to the next step.

Stop. Listen. Collaborate

The next step is having both sales and marketing work on creating guides, strategies, processes, expectations for content, and potential types of dashboards fine-tuned to be mutually beneficial for both. 

Create channels, both traditional, i.e., set meetings for discussion that contain the top-three essential items to cover each week to move forward, such as wins, losses, and process improvements, not to mention what’s evolving through your CRM or tech stack. 

What needs to happen organizationally is optimizing collaboration and bottom-line results, creating a symbiotic working relationship. 

Classic Occam’s Razor, make it simple as possible, but not simpler.

Let’s look at five common challenges that marketing and sales teams experience and how to solve them. 

Common Challenges From Misalignment

A considerable misunderstanding comes from beliefs individuals in marketing and sales have often arrived at through education, training, and definitions of their separate roles. 

Marketing teams make decisions based on insights into campaigns, research, and data.

Sales teams make decisions based on insights into customer interactions. 

Some sales teams need to pay more attention to the importance of data insights, and some marketing teams need to listen to current or potential customers.

When insights fail to be communicated regularly, fundamental differences between the two will invariably lead to misalignment in their decisions, priorities, and the two team’s working relationship. 

One may assume it’s the data, stupid, the other pointing a finger they’re tone-deaf to reality outside technology. 

Challenges are opportunities in disguise

Organizations that struggle with communication and alignment can experience the following challenges:

Marketing Challenges:

• New leads are not appreciated
• Sales teams do not use content
• An influx of last-minute demands
• Sales do not follow processes

Sales Challenges:

• Leads provided by marketing are unqualified
• Inability to find the right collateral when needed
• Content and brochures are not relevant to actual buyers
• Marketing is incentivized by lead volume, not quality

While these challenges are common for many organizations, most consider them an accepted norm in business. 

From my personal experience fixing this mentality, the businesses that focus on marketing and sales working closely together close 50-75% better than those who remain siloed. 

I’ve helped turn around businesses simply by bringing sales and marketing onto the same page. 

It’s not rocket surgery. Many of these challenges disappear by taking the time to get teams swimming in the same direction, understanding each other, and even aspects of each other’s jobs.

Aligning Sales and Marketing

How can you get everyone on the same page? 

One of the best ways to ensure better alignment is by enabling both teams better access to each other and having a common digital toolbox.

Marketing needs best-in-class tools to create content to produce and generate leads for sales, and sales need the best-in-class tools to help them sell more effectively. 

To achieve this, the brand collateral, both digital and traditional for those still using such a thing, must tell the same story. 

By approaching enabling sales and marketing collaboratively, marketing can use and share insights from sales. Sales will have insights and knowledge from marketing, empowering each other to close deals and generate revenue.

5 Steps to Building a Collaborative Marketing and Sales Strategy

Communications are the key to business success, producing revenue and a sustainable business, and employee happiness and camaraderie at their jobs.

With happiness in mind, here are five steps you can take to create collaboration:

1. Review How You Approach Goals

The first step is to reevaluate both teams’ goals and adapt them to meet company objectives. Develop a framework to align specific tactics to set and track and measure KPIs and achieve goals. For marketing, what is a good, quality lead? For sales, how can they improve their funnel?  

2. Put Recurring Meetings on the Calendar (non-negotiable)

Look, I get it, we all hate meetings, but this is one rare case, live discussions are vital for both marketing and communication. Every week both sales and marketing learn new things to share (if not, you’ve got deeper issues). Keep meetings short, sweet, but informative. Have both teams discuss high-level learnings: Ideal customers, buyer challenges and objectives, wins, and losses. How can both use their duties and technology to build a better pipeline? Process improvement can feel slow, but it’s gradual, quantitative, and builds over time.

3. Collaborate in Mapping Out the Customer Journey

The funnel, however you define it, should be mapped from top to sale to retention, ensuring you’ve mapped nurturing at each stage. This is where marketing and sales unite to provide brand information that is always relevant to the right people at the right time.

4. Identify Brand Content and Identify Gaps

Existing and new content should be continually reviewed and evaluated to ensure it meets the buyer journey and the organization’s goals met. By having an open dialogue of challenges both in marketing and sales, bottlenecks and opportunities will reveal themselves. Sales and marketing can collaboratively fix issues, explore new possibilities, and be each other’s feedback loops.

5. Trust in Your Tech Stack

A good CRM centralizes every touchpoint of your audience, from potential buyer to sale, showing the entire journey, including every touchpoint, asset, and insight into what works and areas for improvement. There are dozens of great CRMs, from pricey to free and freemium, without which, even with meetings between sales and marketing, you may verbally arrive at the same place. 

Without a tech stack, organization-wise, at best, you may get by for a while on dumb luck. At worst, you’ll crash and burn, or any competition that aligns sales and marketing and uses a CRM will eat your lunch. A collaborative CRM and set of tools will ensure parity goes beyond the meeting to sales, revenue, and happy customer. 

Technology and Talking

When marketing and sales work and talk together harmoniously, it’s easier to hit revenue targets, ensure your reach the right audiences, know what’s working and what isn’t, and guarantee every lead is well-nurtured.

In conclusion and tl;dr:

• Implement meetings
• Deploy a tech stack

If you need assistance growing your organization, I have a history of building teams and fixing marketing and sales for global household name companies worth billions.

The world is a strange place, don’t be a stranger.