As a marketer, winning the love of your sales team can take your operation to the next level. Aligning teams can optimize opportunities, boost conversions, and increase revenue. While this alignment is no revolutionary construct, the disconnect between teams is a tale as old as time.
In essence, marketing discovers and sales closes. Two different responsibilities, on two different teams, with two different goals. Apples and oranges. But at the end of the day, they’re both fruit. As a marketer, you’ll find that winning over your sales team can make your entire operation a whole lot sweeter.
So how do you woo your sales team? We’ve uncovered five secrets to win over sales and align your teams for total domination.
Treat your Sales Team like a Customer
Ultimately, your sales team is working towards a quota. They’re fixated, eyes-wide on a predetermined number. Their job is to close new revenue, which grows the entire organization. Needless to say, they’re vital to the company and should be treated as such. Therefore, to win over your sales team, treat them as your most valuable internal customer. Your product? Leads. Develop your product to be robust, valuable, and uphold the highest quality. Open direct lines of communication with your customer and take feedback to continuously improve your product. The better the product, the happier the customer, and, in turn, a happy sales team.
Set a Common Goal
While your sales team defines success through a quota, your marketing team may be measuring a KPI such as cost-per-lead or total qualified leads. With two different goals, it’s easy to mishandle priorities and misunderstand what each team is working on. To create a transparent environment, establish a common goal. Collaborate with sales to create a shared objective that values quality over quantity. Dial in on Customer Life Time Value, as it is considerably harder to find new customers than keep existing ones.
Establish a Company Language
So you’ve established a common goal, great! Now, how would you define a lead? How about an opportunity? Would your sales team agree? To institute a shared goal, both teams must have a shared understanding of everyday terminology. Ask your sales team to document these everyday terms and establish a wide-spread language to serve as the holy grail of demand gen dictionaries.
Use Artificial Intelligence
Collaborate with your sales team to establish a target customer and ideal persona. Try to be as specific as possible to capture the nuances, activities, industry, schedule, and region of your target. Utilize your existing customer base as a private resource to uncover patterns and behaviors in your best customers. Better yet, take advantage of artificial intelligence to scour this ocean of data. Machine learning can pinpoint what content, channel, and messages that resonate best with your customers and what falls flat. AI allows you to deeply understand your customers to keep conversion rates sailing strong.
Make a game plan with Sales
You’ve identified a lead, it’s qualified, warm, and ready to receive some hands-on nurturing from sales. When it’s transitioned, where does sales take it from there? Revenue can quickly slip between the cracks if a shared hand-off process is not put in place. Work with sales to establish a mandatory process, with shared responsibility across both teams. Once in place, sit back and watch opportunities transition swiftly and your sales team swoon.
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