War Between SALES and MARKETING or How to get them work together
It’s true. Sales and marketing don’t get on. In fact, over 80% of the terms sales and marketing teams use to describe each other negatively. 50% of marketers are not satisfied with the level of communication between the teams and 50% of sales professionals are not satisfied with marketing’s support. It’s bad for business and this war has got to stop.
When sales and marketing work together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: mostly sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower- according to the Harvard Business Review.
Both sales and marketing are working to grow the company and increase its brand awareness. Both want more customers, more brand awareness and more profits. While each team takes a different route, ultimately everyone is heading in the same direction. It’s a good way to find common ground. Both need to understand customers’ challenges, their pain points and objections to make a sale.
Marketers are highly analytical and project focused. They’re all about building competitive advantage for the company. Salespeople, in contrast, spend their time talking to existing and potential customers. They are skilled speakers and relationship builders. Sales is the front line, marketing is in the back line of any successful company. Sales know who is buying and why this or that customer is motivated to buy in the first place. Marketing understands the industry at large and who they should be targeting. Ideally, sales teams are brilliant at leads generation (finding buyers) and closing sales but they need marketing team’s support to create materials that showcase their expertise.
There are sorts of things that marketing teams can do to make a salesperson’s life easier. Mostly, marketing program should be feeding sales team potential buyers and high quality leads․ Otherwise, sales team will be wasting their time chasing the wrong people.
It’s good to work together to create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Then identify buyer personas within the ICP that the sales team typically interacts with during the sales process (include their characteristics, pains, questions and motivations). All the branding and messaging should be designed to attract created ICP and buyer personas, and we should give the buyers the information they need to hear at each stage of the buying cycle.
As marketing focusing its efforts on educating prospects, the sales team will spend more time talking to sophisticated buyers who are ready to purchase. Back in the day, sales team would have educated buyers on their industry, products, services and competitors. Now buyers do most of their research and comparison online before they speak to sales. Marketing campaign and attractive content allow each sales team to spend more time nurturing relationships and closing sales instead of answering the same questions over and over.
In fact, if sales and marketing get on well together, they can be the unstoppable dream team for every successful company.
