Are Sales and Marketing Missing an Opportunity to Work Together?

I don’t know why, but in some companies, sales and marketing hardly talk to each other, no less work together. Don’t they realize that they are on the same team? It’s a shame because by working together they can identify, qualify and close more sales. The answer is to open a two-way communication.

Marketing is (or should be) managing the conversations with potentials and helping move them through the sales funnel and then handing them off to sales for the close.

Ironically though, for marketing to move the prospect through, they need to address relevant issues and that’s where sales comes in. This will help build your credibility and hopefully shorten the selling cycle.

Sales are on the streets everyday talking to contractors and distributors. They know what’s keeping them up at night and can bring those issues back to you to develop content around. Sounds logical, doesn’t it?

I read an article by Mark Sherbin, Find Content Marketing Gold by Mining Your Sales Department that brought home some useful tips. Here are some highlights for marketing and sales to work together:

  • Set up one-on-one and group meetings with sales
  • Do your homework by reading CRM reports to see if there are valuable nuggets
  • Send out an agenda prior to meeting so sales has time to think about responses
  • Use “Go to meetings,” Google+ Hangouts or another service to get folks together
  • Have regular meetings at least once a quarter
  • Share content developed from the meetings with whole team
  • Create files of new content that is accessible by sales
  • Keep an open channel for communications

These are some good tips. What are you doing to ensure your sales and marketing teams are working together?

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