6 Benefits of Collaboration Between Marketing and Sales Teams

Just like Batman and Robin, Ross and Rachel, peanut butter and jelly, Sonny and Cher, sales and marketing are the perfect compliment to one another. Alignment between the two is crucial to decreasing time to close and increasing revenue.

Sales and marketing play an equally important role within the organization, but too often, individuals or teams as a whole lose sight of this and operate (poorly) as independently functioning machines. And does anyone want a plain jelly sandwich? When sales and marketing departments are not properly aligned, the result is unqualified leads and/or frustrated prospects.

Here are six of the many benefits of collaboration between your marketing and sales teams.

1. Better Qualified Leads

There’s nothing worse than wasting time, energy, and resources on an unqualified lead who was doomed from the start. Sales and marketing teams that are in near constant communication allow information to flow freely from department to department. This means sales can return leads that aren’t quite sales-ready back to marketing for further nurturing. In addition, sales reps can inform marketing of where poor leads are coming from, so marketing can use this information to adjust their strategies accordingly.

2. Increased Revenue

According to HubSpot, organizations with excellent sales and marketing alignment close 38 percent more deals, achieve 27 percent faster three-year profit growth, and achieve 208 percent higher revenue than organizations with disconnected sales and marketing teams.

3. Buyer Personas That Match The Audience

Both sales and marketing departments rely on buyer personas to appeal to the audiences that will invest in your product or service. But often, organizations whose marketing and sales team have ineffective communication find that their buyer personas do not line up with their target audience. What’s the point of putting in the time to create buyer personas and marketing collateral targeted to those personas if the audience isn’t an appropriate target? Collaboration between sales and marketing helps marketing generate content that will capture the audience sales is after.

4. Marketing Creates The Right Material

Most likely, there are several questions your sales reps receive again and again from customers. When sales communicates this to marketing, they can create content — a one-pager, whitepaper, ebook, or blog post —  to inform their audience. Sales can use these materials to save time, and prospects can use them to make more informed decisions.

5. Stay Ahead Of The Competition

Most marketers constantly patrol their competition’s website, blog posts, and other marketing material so they know where they stand in relation to other vendors. If marketing keeps sales informed of the tactics and positioning of their competitors, sales can properly address why their product is superior to their competitors when speaking with prospects.

6. Happy Customers

Poor communication between sales and marketing can leave customers with a bad taste in their mouth. For example, a miscommunication between departments about an expired promo code can create confused and frustrated customers. When sales and marketing communicate properly, brand messaging is always aligned, and the right products and promotions are always highlighted, providing the smoothest possible experience to the customer.

The benefits speak for themselves, but how do you achieve marketing and sales alignment? Here are a few tips:

Ensure proper communication between sales and marketing.

A weekly meeting allows the two departments to identify common KPI’s and goals, brainstorm promotional ideas, discuss the quality of leads coming in, and communicate what each needs from the other.

Hold each other accountable.

Identify each department’s individual metrics for success and SLAs, and discuss them in your weekly meeting. If an area is falling short of your goals, discuss what can be done to improve, together.

Invest in Knowledge Sharing.

Help teams stay aligned by giving them the right tools. Tools like a chat app and a knowledge management solution allow members of each team to easily communicate with one another outside of the weekly meeting, and allow sales to quickly find the material marketing produces, exactly when they need it.

Marketing and sales teams are both incredibly valuable to the company, but when their efforts are in sync, the results can be astronomical. Follow these tips to achieve the benefits, and your prospects will flow seamlessly through the sales funnel.