When I was a child, my brother and I broke our Mum’s favourite necklace. When Mum asked “Who did this?” we had two options: either fight and blame each other or put the “innocent puppy” look on and hold hands. The latter would do the trick and would bring my brother and I closer together, as we rallied towards a unified goal. Avoiding the inevitable punishment of our Mother.

Now, we can leave the analogy there. But, in reality your sales and marketing team aren't very different from my brother and I. Whether it's business or family – we're all far more productive when we play nice and work together. Often this is the intention, but as pressure mounts and questions are asked we can become wayward in desperate moments. The good news, is that this can all be avoided by setting tin place groundwork for a more productive and positive relationship from the very start. Maybe the below sounds familiar?

Sales And Marketing Are Not Working Together

“Why can’t we be friends?”

For sales working with marketing, and vice versa, is like dieting - you force yourself to do it because it’s good for your future, but inside you just want to go home and eat a $4.95 Domino’s pizza.

The friction between the sales and the marketing team is originated for two main reasons:

1. They have different goals

Marketing guys love analysing things and set long-term projects with a strong foundation, as such increasing brand recognition, generating a healthy inbound marketing strategy or funnel with enough qualified leads for the long haul. However, salespeople move in the fast lane. They have monthly or quarterly quotas to meet, and if they can solve a problem for a prospect, they need the information of the marketing team now to close the sale today.

But sometimes, this information is not available yet. And here’s when they might start yelling at each other

2. Misunderstood roles

Marketers and sales perceive their roles in the sales and revenue generation procedure in a different manner. If you ask a inbound marketing person what they do for business, she will say that their role is strategically thinking and generate. “Generate what?” I asked. “Generate activity, awareness and leads” she screamed while energetically shaking her skinny latte.

Sales, on the other side, works on the fast building side. Establishing personal relationships and generate tangible results. They want to see the results right here, right now.

While different, both teams are engaged in the Buyer’s journey with the same final destination: getting more prospects and bring them to the end of the funnel. By working together to attract qualified leads and create an effective buying experience sales and marketing team can engage with their audiences and hold their hands during the selling and buying processes.

Sales And Marketing Integration

“Make sales, not war”

When marketing and sales can get over their differences and align to work together, magical things happen. They can increase the revenue cycle while cutting the cost of doing business. Most companies spend 30-40% of their revenue on Sales and Marketing activities. This means that if both coordinate themselves, they can optimise not only the company activity and ROI, but also the spending.

The point is having an integrated engagement strategy, wherever and whenever your consumers interact with your company. Marketing and sales activities should be connected to consolidate an improved customer interaction, creating a great knowledge- based relationship with potential and existing customers.

Is essential for marketers to understand the buyer persona and establish a content strategy to communicate with them effectively. The digital environment and social media has created new opportunities to deliver great content through more channels and reach a bigger audience, attracting and nurturing qualified leads.

Here’s the tool the HubSpot marketing team uses to educate Sales on the process of where a lead is at buyer’s journey.

Generally, the potential customers they reach are not ready to buy – yet. Here’s when salespeople influence one buyer at a time when they are closer to the buying decision, acting fast and smart to smoothly drive them towards the end of the funnel. Congratulations teams, you just got a new customer.

Content marketing is the “X” factor

If there is something that both marketing and sales love, apart from a good coffee, is content.

Why? Because content creation what drives the whole customer relationship lifestyle cycle.

Like we’ve said in our previous posts, In B2B prospects complete 77% of their buying decision before contacting a salesperson. This creates important boundaries to the job of the salespeople. Content marketing is the way the sales team can reach the potential customer and influence their buying decision. But this content can’t be created and delivered without the help of the marketing team. Now is the time to hold hands with your buddy.

Both teams should gather and share case studies, customer insights and social media support. This will help to create effective content, and represents an opportunity for sales to help to drive the message.

Marketing Automation, The Integration Tool

Automation is the key word. Technologies like SalesForce and Hubspot have automated both sales and marketing, allowing them to effectively measure ROI. A CRM integration with the automated marketing technology can give both teams real-time feedback to identify gaps in the automated sales process.

When sales identify good prospects in sales automation, marketers can pick them up through marketing automation and market specific and relevant content. When the sales team finds lost opportunities - for example, an unqualified lead is passed to sales automatically- sales will pull a CRM report to marketing, and they will generate new content to become more accurate and fill the gap in the sales process.

Properly done, marketing automation will allow you to make investment decisions based on ROI, reflecting sales’ return on marketing’s investments. Remember that marketing and sales automation is only as good as the information you put into it.

If marketing and sales work together around a single revenue cycle, they will dramatically improve marketing ROI, sales productivity and, most importantly, top-line growth. Teamwork makes the dream work!