Opinion

Make 2021 the year of collaboration

3 Phase Marketing managing director Tamara Alaveras suggests breaking down the barriers of two of your most important teams.

In the wake of “new year, new me” sayings that continue to saturate social feeds, we’re forgetting one integral word that keeps the bottom line of business booming. It’s not found in a meme, and doesn’t involve AI or technology. It’s a simple, timeless principle: collaboration.  

When was the last time your Marketing team and your Sales team honestly collaborated?

These two pivotal teams often work almost in rivalry with one another. Who hasn’t heard “Marketing isn’t doing enough to support us,” or “the sales team isn’t embracing our campaigns or ideas”? More to the point, when was the last time your teams last met in person?

Putting differences aside, when sales and marketing are truly unified, both will become more valuable to your customers. With your Sales team interacting with your customers all day, every day, they hear about customer pain points, business challenges, what’s going well and what’s not going so well. That invaluable intel opens up opportunity: not only will a united approach between sales and marketing help retain existing customers and relationships, but combined, they will also help you source new business and prospects.

Sales will be able to give marketing content ideas, which can then translate into an email sequence, Facebook ad copy, vibrant content and social media content at large. Sales can also help design a sales funnel by addressing your customers’ pain points; collectively; they instantly provide real value to your target audience. And sales can help you overcome objections online and refine FAQs, while marketing can implement seamless campaigns, including automated messaging, to sync with the customer’s journey.

Where to from here? Make a pointed effort to have marketing and sales meet regularly to discuss market feedback and customer insights. Bring them together and treat those areas of your business as one.

meeting team collaboration office teamwork

Begin by sharing your data collection between both teams. Sales should understand that marketing works more effectively when they know which strategies are best performing and have clear insights and feedback directly from the client. With quality insights, the teams can mutually collaborate on a high-performing strategy to add value to their customer.

Plus, CSO Insights reports that companies with dynamic, adaptable sales and marketing processes “report an average 10% more of their salespeople meet their quotas compared to other companies”.

Set common and mutual KPIs between the two teams. Your sales and marketing KPIs need to be in alignment for all short-term measurements of success. The Harvard Business Review reports that when sales and marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on all performance metrics with shorter sales cycles, lower market-entry costs, and lower cost of sales.

Lastly, encourage open conversations between sales and marketing to fill in the gaps. Make it a regular occurrence – preferably in person, but considering the current Covid climate, online is fine too. Encourage socialisation and share the joint wins both teams have experienced, together.

It’s a simple step, but collaboration will make a world of difference and make your business marketing communications more effective. Let the sparks fly and solve your client’s problems as one.

Tamara Alaveras is a managing director of 3 Phase Marketing. 

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