Even with Service-level Agreements (SLA) and regular meetings, your marketing team may not be doing enough to connect with your sales team. It’s important that your marketers look for additional ways to show the sales team how their efforts are helping achieve revenue goals.
One way of doing this is by having your marketers think about the sales team as another customer base, and try to “market” the role of marketing to that internal audience.
As with any marketing campaign, it helps to tailor your message to the audience’s persona. In the case of the typical salesperson, that’s someone who’s super busy, doesn’t want to be distracted, doesn’t want to read long reports, and needs to know how the information you’re sharing will help them right now.
Here are 2 ways to improve communication between sales and marketing:
1. Consistent Updates
Consolidate the information you need to convey to the sales team into simple, weekly newsletter-style reports intended to help them do their job. Here is an example of two weekly reports:
- Weekly Marketing Update: Weekly marketing updates can consist of a list of weekly planned promotions with short sound bites. This information helps the sales team understand where new leads are coming from, so they can prepare for those contacts.
- Weekly Product Update: If your product or service changes often, consider informing your sales team about these changes. Send these weekly email updates from your email marketing platform, so you can track open and click through rates (CTR). You’ll see which sales reps are reading the updates and which ones are ignoring them. And if you notice overall opens and CTR declining, you know it’s time to refresh the newsletter format or tweak information you’re sharing to make the report more valuable to the sales team.
2. Reshuffle Desks
You can also encourage better communication within your team by mixing sales and marketing desks together. By sitting next to each other, marketers get to see firsthand how salespeople do their jobs – and whether marketing activities are actually helping them.
Sales reps benefit by having a neighbor they can reach out to with questions about particular leads, or about new marketing campaigns. These informal conversations go a long way toward keeping the entire team happy and productive.
