Nearly 85% of companies that work to improve the customer experience report an increase in profit.  This stat shows how important customer experience is in every business. It shows how important their journey is from when they first see the business to eventually becoming a lifelong customer.  Creating a marvelous customer experience requires a team effort. It's not one member on a company team that creates the experience for the customer. Every team member has to be involved. Unfortunately, when it comes to sales and marketing, often times the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Your marketing team is hard at work creating the brand message, the sales collateral and other vital information you need communicated to your customers - and your sales team is completely unaware of their efforts. If your sales team is unaware of what your marketing team is doing, that means your customers never get that message. When your customers are left in the dark, your business suffers. Here's what you need to need to know to have an effective sales and marketing team work together. 

How Sales and Marketing Can Work Together

The role of a marketer is to bring business awareness to a potential customer, an ideal customer. They introduce the product to a specific customer and show how that product can help them solve a problem.  The transition from generating marketing leads to the sales team is vitally important. Sales need to know how soon the leads came in, who they are, what they are interested in, in addition to other critical information. This is why communication between the marketing and sales team is vitally important. They shouldn't be seen as two distinct roles, but rather as roles that overlap and help one another.  You can see how we help sales and marketing create a unified calendar. You get pre-approved posts that are ready to share with your customers.

The Value of a Calendar

Sales and marketing teams benefit from a calendar.  The marketing team knows what to post on social media and what to advertise. The sales team is also kept in the loop is being posted. It also gives the sales team some insight on leads and what advertisements they may have clicked on from a specific social media ad.  You can also have sales and marketing create a calendar around promotions. This promotes discussion around business goals and how to get more customers.  Teams can discuss blog topics that may interest some businesses or customers. They can discuss when to roll out a specific campaign and how to strategically attract more people to their business. The sales team can also give some insight into the customer. The sales team may have more information about the customer based on initial discussions with them and what they like or don't like about the advertisements or products.

Discuss Campaign Goal Together

A strategy is incredibly important for any team. And a strategy plan is more likely to succeed when everyone is on the same page.  Goals should be discussed for any campaign. Marketing should talk to sales about their ideas on generating more clicks, more impressions, and overall more leads. Sales should provide some feedback on these goals and the campaign in general.  The marketing team can also help the sales team by suggesting a realistic number of leads that may come in that can generate a specific revenue.  In addition, it's important for sales to discuss their goals of revenue. They may want to talk to marketing about retargeting strategies. But marketing may want to try a completely new campaign and target new subscribers.  This is why it's important for any kind of team to collaborate on goals. It's important to come to terms with a unified goal that ultimately helps the customer. 

Discuss the Gaps 

With any marketing campaign, there will be gaps. There will be disagreements. And there will be mistakes.  If a 15% sale didn't work so well in an email campaign, it's important to figure out what went wrong. Don't blame the marketing team or the sales team. It's important to collaborate and figure out how to improve the campaign instead of pointing fingers.  Marketing can ask sales if there was a past campaign that did well and create a similar campaign around that message. In the same way, sales can also ask marketing what advertisements have done the best and perhaps use it to target a different audience.  The point is, there should never be blaming. The workplace between marketers and people in sales should be one where people can feel comfortable working with each other and not feeling judged. 

Get to Know Your Events

It's important to have special events or parties for teams to feel more comfortable working with each other.  These events are designed to get to know the person, not the function of that person's job.  You can do scavenger hunts, escape room challenges, laser tag, board game tournaments, and so much more. The point of these events is to reduce team stress. It's to create a bonding experience. More importantly, these events create a culture of helping each other out without feeling the fear of failure. When this is cultivated, you have a sales and marketing team that is always trying to help each other accomplish each other's goals.  Events can help close the gap in building trust in the workplace. 

Always Try to Help Each Other

It can be easy for a team to stay in their comfort zone. Admitting mistakes and trying to work together can be difficult.  But if your sales and marketing teams can pull together to create unified goals, it benefits the company. It benefits the customer. And that is what every campaign and goal should be for, the customer.  Creating work events, parties, or some sort of environment where co-workers of different teams feel comfortable sharing with each other is vitally important. It creates trust. And the customer ultimately feels that trust from your company in each step of their journey.  If you're looking to build this trust between sales and marketing and to create a remarkable customer journey, you can contact us here.