If you want to take your business to the next level, you ne to bridge the gap between Marketing and Sales. Learn how to do it!
At the beginning of my career in Marketing , I saw the Sales team as the enemy. I start working in a call center, an environment where reps idoliz Gordon Gekko and their favorite movie was “The Price of Ambition.”
They were season reps who saw me as the marketing lady , too inexperienc to spot a potential customer even if she bump into me. I was in my twenties, blogging since 1998 and building websites on GeoCities since the mid-nineties.
It was 2005 and I thought I had my place, even though I was still a junior marketing professional. I was arrogant and they were right. I didn’t know anything about lead generation or what it meant to capture a high-quality lead.
At the time, my definition of a good lead was getting a first name, last name, and phone number. Then, salespeople had to call them and close the sale. That’s how I saw it.
My job was to get numbers for them to try to
close sales. It didn’t matter whether these people ne what was being sold or not.
“Convert the leads I’m giving you” or, as the sales team’s favorite movie says: ” If you can’t convert the leads you’ve receiv, you can’t convert anything .”
The marketing team was not strategic. We weren’t even working on getting leads.
I would come in early every morning to morocco email list 800000 contact leads find an email with 100 leads to distribute. I would download them, print them out, and assign them, writing the sales reps’ names in the top left corner of the paper. I would then hand the contacts over to them and go about my day.
As they were calling the leads, I was receiving feback from the salespeople. Many of them sent me back papers with notes, telling me what I had done wrong.
“They thought they were competing to win a free car.”
“There is no one with that name who has this number.”
“This person’s first name says Batman.”
The sales executives were right, the leads were terrible and the worst thing was that our communication had serious problems.
The relationship between Marketing and Sales was broken and the teams saw each other as enemies. We were not align on our goals and we did not discuss what we could do to improve.
But that was in another time, I was another marketing professional.
Fast forward 15 years and I see things completely differently. Sales is not the enemy. We ne each other to be successful .
Without communication , marketing teams may not
have a clear understanding of what the sales team is hearing from potential customers. This can impact the messaging that marketing uses when promoting the company’s core product.
Furthermore, when there is a gap is b2chat free? between Marketing and Sales and both teams have misalign objectives, each may feel that their goals are unattainable and, consequently, become demotivat.
Another challenge often fac when this lack of alignment occurs is that no team is held accountable for specific goals .
Looking back at the beginning of my career, I rarely saw a marketing team take responsibility when the sales team complain about lead quality.
Instead, it was common to blame salespeople, saying they were not managing the lead list effectively.
How content bridges the gap between Marketing and Sales and aligns teams
Sales enablement strategies became more common in 1999. At that time, a brand manager at Miller Brewing Company notic several flaws in the company’s sales operations and brand messaging.
Today, most organizations focus on aero leads optimizing the sales process using content, software ,