Are your Sales and Marketing Teams Playing Nicely Together?
Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from David Hazeltine, Director, Campaign Strategy at Fiserv.
Sales and Marketing integration. It’s such a nice theory, but yet in so many companies, the Sales team isn’t happy with the amount or quality of leads being generated by Marketing. Marketing is frustrated that salespeople won’t give them the time of day, never mind appreciate that Marketing exists for one reason: to support Sales. If sales are down, fingers point to Marketing for not providing enough leads. If there are no marketing campaigns in the works, fingers point to Sales for not clearly stating what they need.
The result? Sales and Marketing don’t get along or play nicely together.
If you are fortunate to work for a company where Sales and Marketing are aligned and integrated, consider yourself lucky. If not, you are in the majority – but you can get these two teams to play nicely together. All it takes is three components:
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Physical Proximity – Are your Marketing and Sales departments adjacent in your office environment? You’d be amazed at how much communication will improve when the members of these teams can conveniently get up out of their chairs and talk face-to-face. I’ve seen many companies where these two critical departments are on separate sides of the building, on different floors, and even in different buildings on a campus. If you want two groups of kids to collaborate and play nicely, the parents must at least get them on the same playground. Move some people around – it’s easy, and most will be open to it, so long as you keep a positive spin on it.
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Emotional Investment – Does your Marketing team attend the weekly Sales team meetings? If the Marketing folks are going to do the best job possible, for the Sales team and for the company as a whole, they’ve got to know what’s on the Sales team’s priority and to-do lists. To make sure everyone is involved, Marketing and Sales should be stakeholders in answering the following questions:
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What industry events do we need to be at, and how can we make the most of these events – before, during, and after?
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If not, can we craft a white paper, case study or byline and get it out there and within what timeframe?
Having exposure to these and similar questions help Marketing team members see that they have some “skin” in the sales game. They’ll be emotionally connected to the sales goals. Knowing what the salespeople are focused on every day, and how things change week to week, will get the Marketing team’s strategy and execution juices flowing. Remember this: all marketing people want is to please the Sales team and senior management. They can only do that by being informed. When they know what the sales team is focused on, their enthusiasm will lead to execution and results. What you want from these employees (and all employees) is the critical emotion of passion in their work – and knowledge sparks passion.
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Food and Beverages – Really?! Yes! By the time you’ve addressed #1 and #2, your marketing and sales teams will have made a commitment to get together as teams. Management should then help strengthen and reinforce the relationships between the individual sales and marketing professionals. Sharing food and beverages is a great way for people to make connections and build a community. Marketing can buy pastries for the Sales team on occasion. Sales can take Marketing out to the local watering hole after work once a month, to show their appreciation (yes, I said sales should show their appreciation for marketing!). Individual sales people can invite individual marketing people out for coffee, lunch, or even a game of foosball in the company lounge, and vice versa. Management can promote and underwrite these activities: suggest this behavior at company meetings, announce and praise camaraderie when you see it, and simply project a company culture of employees being nice to, caring for, and communicating with each other. Again, employees want to please management – but you’ve got to let them know that you are pleased.
I cannot emphasize this enough: it’s up to management to infuse this relationship-building. Your sales and marketing people won’t likely do it on their own.
Just this week, I saw a blog post by Sam Kusinitz of HubSpot about alignment between sales and marketing teams, and “mutual accountability” – and this alignment was defined as “Smarketing,” which I thought was great. Many companies are moving towards melding “sales” and “marketing” functions and employees of those functions into one, to be known as “Sales Marketing.” This phenomenon begs the question… Who separated sales and marketing in the first place?!
When Sales and Marketing are aligned physically, mentally, and socially, and when management strives to keep it that way, everyone in the company will notice; and it won’t be long until this “investment” has a healthy effect on your company’s bottom line.
David Hazeltine is Director, Campaign Strategy at Fiserv -- a leading global provider of information management and electronic commerce systems for the financial services industry. Over his 29-year career, David has created and executed numerous advertising, marketing and direct response campaigns, in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. He resides in Hingham, Massachusetts with his wife of 19 years and three children.