Working at a marketing agency in both creative and sales at the same time has made me realize a thing or two.

Sales teams don’t like marketing teams, in fact, most of the time they operate on the other side of a pendulum swing in the professional world.

It can be a constant battle of who takes credit for what, and who’s responsible if goals aren’t met.

It’s the “I can’t hit my goal because marketing didn’t drive enough inbound leads.”

Or the “We drove in leads with our content, and our sales team isn’t following up with the leads fast enough. We can’t hit our targets if they don’t close those leads.”

It’s as if I told you your body parts were pissed off because they thought they were doing all the work, but your Belly got all the food. They believed the Belly was lazy and unproductive.

Furthermore, they decided that they would hold a meeting to discuss how unfair this seemed. After that meeting, the body parts voted that they would go on strike until the Belly agreed to take its proper share of the work.

The unhappy body parts didn’t do anything for several days in an attempt to stop feeding the Belly. The Legs stopped walking, the Hands stopped moving, and the Teeth stopped chewing.

As the body parts starved the Belly, the Legs became more and more tired, the Hands could hardly move anymore, and the Mouth became parched and dry.

Eventually, the entire Body collapsed and passed away as the Belly completely starved.

For your business to grow, and not starve, sales and marketing need to be a collaborative team. You need communication, marketers should be listening in and going on sales meetings, and sales team should be helping create content.

You should be matching the way you market and sell, to the way your customers shop and buy.

The Problems Sales/Marketing Teams Face

Impatience and Hubris, characteristics we all must battle to be successful in business. We want results, and more than ever we want documented analytics to back up those results.

Knowing that the tension comes from the fact that successful marketing takes the time to build. While there are some efforts like paid ads will give you that instant gratification, most other channels can take months to see those measurable results.

With that, the biggest challenge arises in quantifying the exact impact of your marketing.

With terms like “Content,” “Inbound”, “Relationship,” and “Agile” shoved in front of Marketing, your sales teams are having a hard time understanding your efforts let alone reading between the lines to see results.

One team with a common goal

We are often working with our client’s sales team, and an excellent way to start to solve these problems is to create one goal that the marketing and sales team agree upon and go after.

You would think this would be an obvious one, but often you will find different targets set for each team and no collaboration at all. Both teams should want more customers, more brand awareness, and more conversions.

With one common goal, you will find some amazing things start to happen naturally. It can create a feedback loop that will help both teams improve their performance.

It lets both teams have a mutual understanding of the tactics and work that each does. Overall it can create a collaborative environment where successes and failures are shared with both groups.

Throughout this process, sales and marketing teams should be geared toward action. Both sides should commit to getting things done. Nobody is perfect, and mistakes will be made, but if both teams can work together, you can accomplish some amazing things.

If your company is looking for help in tearing down the walls between your sales and marketing team, the time is now, contact Boldthink today.