Last year, I wrote a post titled Three Things Marketing Wishes They Could Say to the Sales Team. It was one of the most read posts in 2021.
With the pace of change in B2B marketing and sales accelerating, alignment between sales and marketing teams is vital as ever for organizations that want to optimize their go-to-market investments.
The most challenging but impactful first step is to improve communications between the two functions.
Bringing up the type of statements below with the sales team can be daunting, but ignoring them gets in the way of building a more robust marketing team. Approaching these topics thoughtfully and openly can help you work through them and allow the sales team to see things from the marketer’s perspective.
Sure, salespeople want qualified marketing leads to start prospect conversations. Post lead generation motions tend to be out of focus for marketers.
If marketing leads convert to an Opportunity that is eventually lost, what should marketing’s role be? What kind of content or communications should marketing provide, and what cadence? If a marketing lead does not convert to an opportunity but is a viable prospect for future engagement, what marketing support could help keep the lead warm or reactivate interest? What type of support is needed from marketing during the opportunity management process.
Salespeople may not know the support they need, but that can provide an ideal opportunity to conduct mutual experiments as to what works best.
The sales team says we need a presence at certain events, but the marketing staff the booth most of the time as we struggle to get salespeople to staff the booth. And when salespeople are at the booth, they keep business cards rather than letting us centralize the capture of visitors.
There are several options to leverage event investments, and they should be discussed in detail with the sales teams well in advance of the event. Perhaps salespeople need to attend educational sessions or meet with customers and prospects rather than staff the booth?
Regardless, the marketing and sales teams should plan booth staffing and optimize the event investment. Maybe the marketing teams end up staffing the booth most of the time, which might be part of the plan to maximize event ROI.
Sales teams often inherit poor contact information from prior administrations, and they rarely have time to update or clean up CRM records. It’s also possible that there has been a lack of training on how salespeople should use and maintain contact information.
Marketing may need to work with sales operations to clean up existing contact records. Sales leaders, sales operations, and marketing should meet to review how to optimize the salesperson’s experience using contacts. Additional sales training might be needed, or perhaps sales leaders need to take a more active role in supporting contact health and hygiene.
Without contacts, emails, and titles, a marketer’s ability to support the sales organization is limited, so resolving contact health and hygiene issues requires a cross-functional effort.