7 Experts Share How They Make Marketing & Sales Collaboration More Effective

Marketing and sales teams rely heavily on one another to drive business. After all, it’s the marketing department that generates leads, and the sales team is relied upon to convert those leads to paying customers. It’s not intuitive, then, that these two functions often exist in silos, each having their own systems and processes.

The new way of thinking is that marketing and sales should be a more collaborative effort, and achieving this goal can dramatically improve results. It’s a great concept, but bringing it to fruition can be more complex than it sounds. Without a sound collaboration strategy, attempting to overlap the two efforts often ends up disjointed and, at times, dysfunctional. So, we asked seven thought leaders for their top tips and best practices for making marketing and sales collaboration more efficient.

Brian Zang, VP Sales & Marketing at店里

“整体思考您的漏斗。

“这不是营销渠道和销售渠道，而是漏斗。停止“扔在栅栏上”或“将它们交给销售”。这只是漏斗和转换可能需要在每个步骤中进行营销和销售触动。转换最好通过产生的收入来衡量，营销和销售都是负责任的。

“为您的业务和渠道定义MQL和SQLS。

“When do you want a salesperson to engage? When should marketing own the lead? How can sales automatically adjust paths after a phone conversation? Put practices in place that understand sales and marketing will have to work together to maximize conversion.”

Erin Wasson, VP of Marketing,UrbanBound

“第一步是确保每个部门都了解双方对什么负责。

“在Urbanbound，我们已经实施了每月的Smarketing（Sales + Marketing）会议，以使每个人都进入同一页面。这使两支团队有机会在同一房间里讨论已经有或尚未正常工作的东西以及每个团队彼此需要的东西以取得成功。了解良好的“ Smarketing”机器的功能可能是失败的公司与成功的公司之间的一个因素。”bob全站app

首席执行官鲍勃·马什（Bob Marsh）LevelEleven

交流并分享成功。

“Here’s the situation, which you’re probably all too well aware of: The modern CMO is held accountable to revenue goals for their marketing investments. But to date there isn’t a clear way to get sales teams aligned on those goals, to execute against those investments. Money is being wasted.

“以下是使销售和营销部门保持一致的5个技巧：

1. 实际坐在同一个房间里
2. 鼓励您的团队不时地进行社交
3. Encourage empathy between the clans
4. 说相同的语言
5. Share in each other's successes.”

营销总监Alex Avritch冲突寻宝游戏

“My best advice: Get on sales calls.

“市场营销是关于了解受众,taking sales calls allows you to get to know them first hand. After a week of taking the occasional call, I felt like I knew our clients personally and that I could better target their needs in our initial online touches.

“Don’t get me wrong, analytics are an amazing thing and I’m definitely a data geek, but when you’re trying to get someone to feel passionately about what you do or the product you sell, sometimes you have to take a step back and relate to the person rather than market to the numbers on your screen.”

内容营销和咨询服务总监Rob Nance，Inovautus

Measure the respective goals and incentives for sales and marketing.

“It’s important to have measurement criteria tying to their respective incentives. True collaboration can only exist between marketing and sales if they both have goals and incentives tied to the performance of each other’s camp.”

Joe Moriarty, VP of Sales and Marketing,Content Raven

提供增加的可见性,使销售团队to engage prospects at the right moment.

“传统上，销售团队直到竞选或计划结束后才能访问潜在客户。当利息达到顶峰时，与潜在客户接触的延迟可能是合格的潜在客户进一步与公司或失去利息与竞争对手的可能性之间的区别。bob全站app为了更加紧密，营销团队需要为销售提供越来越多的可见性，即潜在客户如何与营销抵押品和下一代分析相互作用，这些分析可以让销售团队知道何时以及如何与潜在客户联系。

“Measuring things such as engagement, device viewing trends, sharing, printing and download history enable marketers and sales professionals to better collaborate on campaigns and strategies. By improving content to closely align with what leads are most interested in, businesses can improve their lead nurturing campaigns.”

Frank Cespedes, author of结盟策略和销售：推动有效销售的选择，系统和行为and Senior Lecturer of Business Administration at Harvard Business School

An ongoing, systemic approach to aligning strategy and sales is key.

“Aligning strategy and sales requires an ongoing systemic approach that integrates three factors internal to the sales organization: the people involved, the control systems that influence their behaviors, and how those controls are applied in the sales force and company environment, with factors external to the sales organization: your business strategy and the target market/customer characteristics that (if you in fact have a strategy) flow from those strategic choices.

“Effective selling is an outcome of an organization's choices and interactions, as well as the motivation and management of sales people. Developing an ideal customer profile and communicating it to those on the frontlines is critical to linking strategy and sales.

“Every company is always (often in implicit and unintended ways) making it easier for some customers to do business with it and harder for others. Customer selection impacts costs, SG&A, profit margins, and (more than generic competency lists) the capabilities of people and the organization. And if you don't choose, your competitors will choose for you.”