No matter the organization’s size, sales and marketing should be partners. They’re both the face of the company. The world sees marketing materials on social media or the website, and all prospective buyers interact with sales collateral and hear the language they speak.
Plus, importantly, sales and marketing teams are all working towards the same high-level goal: growing the business.
So, what’s required to make the relationship successful? And how does marketing handle last-minute demands from sales while balancing their ‘own’ workload?
Of course, regular communication, shared objectives, and constructive two-way feedback are vital to preserving and developing the relationship. But those things are easier said than done.
This blog provides a few ways that marketing can support sales and vice versa, mainly when there’s a complex multi-stage sales cycle.
- Why the sales and marketing relationship matters
- Challenges when working with sales
- How marketing can support sales
- How sales can support marketing
- 3 key elements of collaboration required for success
Why the sales and marketing relationship matters
In theory, marketing generates top-of-funnel interest in the business, helps build a recognized brand, attracts new organizations, and educates them on the product’s value. Then, the sales team convinces interested buyers of a business case for the solution and converts them into customers.
In reality, the buyer’s journey isn’t as clear-cut. The road is often bumpy, with twists and turns along the way. A prospect may engage with sales, see an ad, and then, months later, download a piece of content before switching jobs.
Then, finally, they send an RFP and decide to evaluate the technology. As a result, every touchpoint and piece of data they collect about your company must be cohesive.
A divide between the language used and product information can lead to a disconnected, confusing organization that prospects or customers don’t fully trust. Therefore, sales and marketing must be in lockstep.
They need to agree on which audience they’re targeting and determine the messaging and differentiators that will resonate to build trust and thereby win more customers.
Cece Lee
What could go wrong? Challenges when working with sales
Imagine the following scenario…
Your sales lead has an important pitch coming up, and there are only a few hours to finalize the slides. They’ve asked you to find some stats and create a narrative and graphics while they work on the commercial proposal.
You pull something together ten minutes before the presentation but haven’t had time to run through the deck, agree on who’ll present which part, or even check with the product team about the availability of specific features the prospect requested.
Worse still, the salesperson forgot to invite you to the meeting, and you have to quickly reschedule another meeting so that you can present the trends and stats section. In the end, you pull it off, but the team was distracted, messaging back and forth on Slack, and the client noticed you were disorganized.
Sound familiar?
Sales teams can be demanding as they focus on their number one goal of closing deals:
- They call on marketing at the last minute to help with a pitch deck, or they cobble together decks that aren’t on brand.
- They go off-script to close a deal, overpromising functionality that isn’t available.
- They constantly ask for materials even though you’ve previously organized and shared them regularly.
- They forget to follow up with inbound leads.
- They don’t update the records in your CRM, making it impossible to track the lead source or accurate pipeline numbers.
- They expect you to make everything look pretty, even though you’re not a designer.
Of course, most sales teams are highly collaborative and hard-working. These scenarios are dramatic and exaggerated and don’t typically happen simultaneously.
However, I’m sure every marketer has experienced some of these challenges in their career. Despite the need for these two teams to work closer together, the relationship may be strained as a result.
How marketing can support sales
The marketing team should be a strategic partner to sales rather than a content sweatshop. That means first agreeing on the ideal audience, how to reach them and which messages are most important.
Here are seven of the best ways marketing can support sales:
Listen
Sales requests may seem unreasonable or out of alignment with existing marketing priorities. However, listening to them and figuring out how to work together more effectively is beneficial.
Listen to recorded sales calls and chat directly with salespeople to understand what they’re struggling with. Track content requests, figure out how urgent they are in closing a deal and prioritize based on their impact on the business. This also means listening to feedback on materials, even if it’s not always actionable.
Educate prospects before they reach sales
Ideally, when a prospect begins the product evaluation process, they’re already familiar with your company. Marketing’s role is to educate prospective buyers way before they even start considering a new product.
That means building brand awareness via social media, running ads, attending events, and sharing news and content that adds value to the business. That way the prospects will be familiar with the brand when sales reach out and conversations should be much easier and quicker.
Gather market intel
Everyone in the company should take a proactive approach to understanding the industry and top competitors. But here’s where marketers have an edge. From quantitative to qualitative research, product marketers sit between departments and can pull information from across the business.
Product marketers can typically get more honest answers during win-loss and product feedback interviews. They want to learn about the client and what they care about instead of trying to influence a sale or get validation for a new product feature.
Share that intel in sales training sessions
Share this information in regular sessions with sales. Tailor presentations to help sales understand market dynamics so they can use their knowledge to impress and influence buyers. These sales enablement sessions might focus on:
- News about competitors and objection handling for a competitive deal.
- Product releases and how to talk about the pain points they solve.
- Partner relationships and why they matter.
- Reasons why a customer chose your product and anecdotes of how they’re currently using it.
- Industry trends and how they might impact prospects.
- Analyst or media write-ups that position the company as a leader.
- Company differentiators. The entire sales team should be trained and aligned on market differentiators.
Build demand
Marketing typically has a quota to get qualified inbound leads. Running events and webinars, creating conversion-focused ads and SEO blogs or sponsored content can all help build the pipeline for sales.
The goal is to support outreach from Sales Development reps and ensure a steady stream of new business. While not typically the role of product marketing, marketers must also set up processes to qualify inbound leads and route them to the right salespeople.
Create relevant materials for every stage of the sales cycle
Work with sales to understand their process and what’s required for a prospect to move to the next stage of the sales funnel. Map out the journey and goals at each stage, then define the types of content that might be helpful.
In the early stages, education about the company and market may come in the form of webinars, eBooks and blogs. In the late stages of a deal, competitive comparisons, business cases for the software, customer references and objection-handling documents may be more helpful.
Marketers should spend most of their time on one-to-many communications, working on projects that sales can leverage repeatedly. Even though information needs to be customized for large, must-win deals, pulling from an existing deck of pre-prepared slides is much quicker than designing them from scratch each time.
Weave stories into every piece of content
Storytelling should be marketing’s sweet spot. Real-world examples and anecdotes help create an emotional connection with customers.
From the first time the buyer learns about the company to the end of the sales cycle, every piece of content and conversation should help sell the buyer on the company’s vision, the ideal use cases and how the product solves their pain points.
The market intel described above should feed into all sales and marketing materials. Customers’ language should inform how the company speaks to them, and competitors’ language should be used to define differentiators and objection handling.
This shouldn’t stop at providing a list of customer quotes to the sales team or writing blogs; wave these stories into demos and sales presentations, too.
How sales can support marketing
Yes, marketing is essential in driving awareness and demand among prospects and assisting in deals, but this only works if the sales team does its part:
Be respectful of marketers’ time
Marketing, particularly product marketing, has a complicated, multi-faceted role. While product marketers are there to support must-win deals and improve pitch decks, they also have products to launch, top-of-funnel content to create, brand stories to build, messaging exercises to run or website copy to update.
Sales members should be patient and understand that marketers may not say yes to every content request. Prioritize your tasks, pick the projects that’ll make a difference, and give marketers as much notice as possible when asking them to help.
Provide insight into deal priorities and objections
The more information marketing has ahead of time, the better. That way, they can spot trends among the team and determine which projects will benefit the greatest number of salespeople.
Use the materials marketing gives you, and if they don’t work, explain why
Look in the shared folder or content system to find the necessary information before asking for it! And stick to the script.
Sure, you want to be personable and add your own flair, but trust that the marketing team has researched their messaging and understands the customer.
If you’re uncomfortable using the materials they’ve provided, tell them why and give recommendations for improvement based on what’s working. Provide concrete evidence of a difficult conversation where something didn’t work.
Constantly provide constructive feedback
I’ve included feedback twice because it’s that important. If a message isn’t resonating, or if you find yourself constantly changing copy or creating new narratives to get the audience’s attention, tell your fellow marketers!
The more information marketing has, the better.
Share the sales call recordings from a few different successful or unsuccessful calls. If you’re having an issue, someone else might be as well, so the more people within sales who share their perception, the better marketing will be able to adapt their materials.
3 key elements of collaboration required for success
Aligning on goals
Agree on which audience segment to target, revenue goals and priorities. Different team members may be focused on different industry types, size of prospect or even selling different products.
However, there should be a good understanding of how marketing activities feed into the pipeline for each market segment. Of course, this is easier said than done, as marketing and sales reporting is a job unto itself. However, having some connected reporting and metrics goes a long way in bringing the teams together.
Having regular communication
The number one priority in any relationship should be clear and frequent communication. A weekly go-to-market meeting is an excellent way to stay on the same page, review deals, share new intel or content and determine where help is needed.
The biggest mistake for marketers is throwing collateral ‘over the wall’ and not asking for feedback or adapting it to changing sales needs. Don’t forget the small stuff. Alert sales when a prospect interacts with marketing content. Or better still, set up an automated tracking system that shows ‘intent’ from a buyer after they engage.
Centralizing materials and processes
Marketing should maintain a centralized content library, whether in a spreadsheet, Confluence or a more advanced content tool like Highspot. And sales should have the tool bookmarked. It wastes everyone’s time if salespeople use different materials or scramble to create a new deck when the same thing already exists in your library.
Now repeat after me. The sales team are my friends. The sales team are my friends…. And don’t forget it’s a two-way relationship, after all.
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