Marketing and Sales Integration: How to Create a Dynamic Duo

As a sales manager, you likely understand the importance and value of marketing and sales integration.

Unfortunately, marketing and sales teams often don’t recognize how much stronger they can each be when they work together. While sales departments typically claim short-term and immediate opportunities as their own, marketing tends to focus on long-term or objective goals.

What if marketing and sales teams could harness the power and strengths of their individual roles and create a dynamic duo?

Well guess what: they can!

Marketing and Sales: Creating a Dynamic Duo

Want to get your marketing and sales teams together for growth? Here are 5 reasons why your teams should integrate and some tips on where to start:

1. Targeting

Targeting is all about focus.

Both marketing and sales departments require targeting tactics to succeed. Salespeople are most successful when they create a target list during the sales prospecting process. But guess what? Marketing teams benefit from the exact same process!

In fact, we’ve discovered that many times marketing teams spend so much time targeting clients by creating buyer personas that they oftentimes have a leg up on sales.

So, if you want to create a truly dynamic duo with your teams—have them get together and exchange best practices for targeting!

2. Understanding Cycles

Cycles can be anything from seasonal changes and holidays, to economic downturns or peaks.

For salespeople, cycles directly affect day-to-day tasks and outcomes. For example, those in the retail sector see high sales during the holiday season from November-December. However, they know these numbers will change when, in January, consumers begin to return unwanted gifts or let their wallets recover from the expenses of gifts and parties.

The beauty of marketing is that they spend a whole lot of time forecasting. Since most marketing teams are knee-deep in charts, graphs, and stats, they are able to grasp trends before they even occur.

So, when it comes to cycles—again, get marketing and sales together! Use the marketing resources in tandem with the experience from sales to come up with a plan to handle cycles effectively.

3. Advertising

Advertising is one of the main drivers in sales, and one of the main tasks in marketing.

Because sales and marketing are often separate entities, it is not always clear whether advertisements are driving sales, justifying often “heavy” marketing budgets.

Ask both marketing and sales the following questions:

• Who is the target?
• What message are we sending?
• Where is our target audience?
• Why this message?
• What is the ROI?

Including sales in current ads goals is critical for alignment.

Determine if your sales team is on the same page with upcoming advertising efforts by the marketing team. Get key stakeholders together to ensure that goals are properly aligned.

And make sure your sales team is aware of what ads are out there. No salesperson wants to get a call from a customer talking about an ad the salesperson has never seen!

4. Brand Identity

Brand identity plays a huge role in driving sales, even beyond what your best salesperson may be capable of.

Brand identity is the reason we subconsciously choose certain products and services over others.

It is crucial that your salespeople understand the company culture and brand that is often created by marketing. This way, when selling, the utilization of keywords and taglines can relate individual salespeople to the entire culture and identity of the firm.

5. Technology

Technology makes it so easy to enable marketing and sales integration!

So, let’s use it!

Marketing uses data analytics and other tools each and every day. Marketing departments use social media analytic tools to track consumer behavior and trends.

Why do so many salespeople fail to take advantage of this?

While it may be time consuming, it wouldn’t hurt to have your marketing team introduce key analytic tools to the sales team. Or, at a minimum, forward on crucial stats!

Beyond analytics, sales and marketing should also discuss other ways to use technology effectively—like exchanging best practices for LinkedIn to target new prospects.

Together, marketing and sales can be a powerful duo and can create countless possibilities!

Get your team growing by getting both departments together and exchanging best practices on a monthly basis. Your prospects will be drawn in and engaged by the information sent out by marketing and nurtured and retained by your integrated sales team.

Now, let’s get to growing!

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