Marketing and sales are two separate teams, but they’re both key to your business’s success. These teams rely on each other to be successful and, in turn, help your brand be successful by attracting more customers, increasing revenue, and nurturing relationships with customers.
Even though these teams have different functions, you’ll find that when they join forces and collaborate, you’ll see numerous benefits, including a stronger ROI. Read on to find out what benefits you can expect when marketing and sales collaborate.
Benefits of Marketing and Sales Collaboration
When your marketing and sales teams are collaborating, you’ll see some high-impact benefits, such as:
1. A Better-Defined Strategy
You want to think about the big picture, right? When your sales and marketing teams are collaborating and in alignment, you’ll get long-term value and your teams will rally around your big-picture goals.
Your marketing and sales teams will be better able to create and launch campaigns aimed at achieving your goals. They’ll also be able to use the insights gained through their alignment to refine and improve upon a strategy for growth.
2. Better Understanding of Your Buyers
Sales and marketing work together to attract, nurture, and close deals. Therefore, they need to be on the same page about who your ideal prospects are and where to find them. The most effective way to do this is by creating and sharing buyer profiles, which are profiles of the ideal customers for your product or service. These profiles also include valuable insights into the prospects’ role, business, and the problem they’re trying to solve.
To ensure your marketing and sales teams are in alignment, they should collaborate to create these profiles. When your teams are working in alignment with each other, you’ll find that the buyer profiles they create are more accurate, and therefore, you have more ownership of your customer’s experience.
Your buyers will feel the effects of this alignment too. They’ll be less likely to feel as though your business is fragmented or like there is confusion throughout the organization.
3. Higher-Quality Leads
Don’t waste your time on unqualified leads. Your sales and marketing team will waste not only their time but also their energy, and the teams may point the blame at each other for why the leads are unqualified.
It’s important for your marketing and sales teams to agree on common terms, language, and lead scoring methods. They can then use this information to find higher-quality leads and focus on targeting these leads.
When your teams are regularly communicating and aligned with each other, you’ll find that information is flowing better between departments. In turn, your sales team can tell your marketing team which assets work best, so your marketing team can adjust its strategies and target the most qualified leads.
4. Enhanced Marketing/Promotional Materials
Your sales team may receive the same set of questions from prospects over and over throughout the sales process. If your sales team communicates these questions to your marketing team, your marketing team will know what content is needed to better inform your target audience.
Your sales team can then use these materials to become more efficient and save time while helping prospects make better decisions. Your marketing team will be better able to create marketing collateral for each stage of your buyer’s journey, such as e-books and sell sheets. Your marketing team can also create templated materials for your sales team to customize as needed.
5. Stronger ROI
Misalignment between sales and marketing teams can cost up to $1 trillion a year, according to HubSpot. This is because approximately 79 percent of leads don’t convert to sales. Additionally, approximately 73 percent of leads that are passed to sales are never contacted.
Efficient collaboration between marketing and sales teams has numerous impacts, including on your ROI. You’ll experience lower costs and increased revenue, leading to an increased ROI; HubSpot reports that businesses with collaborative marketing and sales teams close 38 percent more deals and have 208 percent higher marketing revenue.
While increased revenue, improved customer retention, brand consistency, and increased marketing are all beneficial on their own, they contribute to results that are greater than these benefits provide on their own.
Ensure Your Teams Have What They Need to Collaborate Successfully
The collaboration of your marketing and sales teams provides many benefits, but you need to ensure they have what they need to work together seamlessly for collaboration to be successful.
A centralized brand and marketing collateral platform will enable your teams to easily access the marketing collateral and customize the materials as needed. Contact us today to learn more about our powerful brand and marketing collateral platform, brandstash.
