Rachel Begg
Helping your sales and marketing teams see the value in working together to achieve business goals should be more like a three-legged race, and less like a tug of war. Enter in SMarketing. Aligning these two groups to work towards interdependent goals by using consistent communication, will help your marketing team in their efforts to attract the right visitors and your sales team in closing more of the right leads. Let’s examine a few of the benefits that merging these two groups presents!
Visibility Into Each Other’s Goals
Working together is one thing. Working towards a common goal with added transparency among your team is another. A clear cut set of interdependent goals ensures that everyone is aware and working towards the same cause. Marketing should be nurturing the right leads down the funnel to help sales close and meet their quotas. Established goals serve as the beginning point of accountability for each side, as well as providing a channel for real time information to flow between sales and marketing. Getting your teams excited about working together is half of the battle. Ensuring that everyone is on the same page is one of the most important practices businesses can do to make sure their targets are being met.
Service Level Agreements
Not all agreements are created equally, but having a Service Level Agreement helps further align the sales and marketing teams. Commonly known as a SLA, it is defined and agreed upon by both the sales and marketing teams. This agreement ensures that a certain number quotas are met by both sides to ensure success for a company. For marketing, a specific number of qualified leads needs to be presented to the sales team, and in return, sales will take those leads, usually better in quality and quantity, and work them to achieve a joint goal.
Data, Data, and More Data!
Creating goals that are both measurable and attainable add another piece to the SMarketing pie of success. Companies can see how teams are performing and address any issues head on relatively quickly, especially when backed by data. Analyzing performance becomes a tad bit easier and adjustments are able to be made on one, or both ends of the spectrum. With a data analyzation process set and benchmarks established, no one side carries all of the weight of closing deals and converting leads. It is a collaborative effort, one that is backed by numbers that leads to overall success.
Closed Loop Reporting
This feedback tool is essential to keeping the lines of communication open and the loop of information closed. The more clear and usable intel marketing is able to provide sales, the more sales is able to see what works and what doesn’t, and in turn provide feedback to marketing. This establishes a few benefits for marketing, such as status updates on leads, increased ROI and information on what efforts are actually working. Conversely, sales teams see benefits in regards to the quality of leads given, the amount of information and insights they have into those leads, and their ability to increase ROI and close rates. All of this comes from a centralized team that prioritizes the relationship and the goals SMarketing helps define.
Ready to dive more into the Sales and Marketing dynamic? Download our free eBook Lead Scoring: The Smarketer's Guide.
