Marketing and Sales - 4 Steps to Collaborate & Grow

Marketing and sales, while aligned at the corporate level, need to also be aligned at operational level to optimize delivery of products and services. 

As a marketer, I wanted sales to succeed because that had a direct impact on my portfolio’s growth projections. However, that could only be achieved when sales teams were enabled with the right level of operational support, and we would collaborate towards delivering those growth targets. If you are a GM, marketer, etc., who is measured on “Year-over-Year growth,” here are some insights on how we (marketing) supported sales team to achieve 5x portfolio growth. 

1. Create processes for sharing customer and market data – communicate with your sales teams on what does the target market look like, to educate them about how to sell the “right” product(s) to the “right” prospect(s). Sales team needs to know how our customers use our products, so they can better understand customer need and prepare to answer specific questions. The process also helps sales teams prepare for upcoming product changes, considering lead times needed to update training manuals, refine sales pitch, train the agents, etc. 
2. Create easy product bundles and sales hierarchy – as a service provider, you probably have more than 1 product in your portfolio. Bundling some of these products is a great strategy to get greater adoption from the customers and communicate the “value for money.” However, it is even more enticing to sales teams, since they can now meet wider customer needs, easily explain the value proposition (think sales call talk times), and possibly make more money (greater sales incentive). Don’t forget to guide the sales teams in how to pitch and what order to explain various product features in, based on your customer surveys and market research.
3. Create fair incentive and charge-back policies – sales incentive are a great way to motivate sales teams, but ensure that “quality” of sale is never compromised. If left unchecked, “slamming” will get you volume, but after-sale churn will eat into the overall growth and acquisition costs. Having a solid charge-back program will greatly help with better quality sale and subsequent lower churn – make sure that the program is transparent and well understood by sales teams.
4. Create reporting and feedback mechanism – one of the biggest pain-points that I had to address was that of inadequate reporting on sales orders, customer activations, charge-back policies, etc. Institute reporting that clearly shows the funnel and is transparent enough for the sales team to understand how they are making money. Most importantly, make sure marketing and sales teams are looking at the same set of numbers! Create adequate feedback mechanisms (weekly, monthly meetings) to gather field data and share any product updates.

Bear in mind that most of this information resides within marketing organizations, as part of their LTV, ROI, etc., analyses. However, actively communicating with sales will empower them and make them see the results with more context.

When engaged, sales teams have great potential in shaping, positioning and marketing our products and services. Integrate this channel into your market intelligence network to boost your market intelligence and growth strategies.