Why Marketing Should Collaborate With Sales
The B2B marketers who are on the leading edge are taking cues from their counterparts on the sales side on how to expand marketing’s role in the sales process, says Bethany Perkins, director, central marketing, Cielo.
“B2B marketers are more attuned to their role in the sales cycle,” she notes. “The partnership between marketing and sales is no longer as strained—the power dynamic is shifting as marketing has more goals, and numbers to hit associated with those goals.”
Perkins will present the session “Closing the Sales and Marketing Loop” at B2B LeadsCon, Aug. 22-24 at the New York Hilton. She’ll share thoughts on how to create a definition of what a qualified lead is for your organization, ways to create better internal communication strategies, and ideas for incentivizing both sales and marketing team players.
Cielo, a global recruitment outsourcing company, has sales, marketing and sales enablement working together as a single entity.
“Our team is structured as the go-to-market team and that makes a big difference,” says Perkins. “We work as a single entity. We do training together, and work toward the same results together. It’s not sales versus marketing, it’s a single team.”
At Cielo, sales and marketing have equal seats at the table. “We discuss how everything fits together,” she says. “Even if we think something marketing is doing might not directly effect sales, we still get their thoughts.”
“We’ve crossed the gap by creating a culture by keeping everyone in the group informed,” Perkins adds, noting that having hard numbers and goals assigned to the team helped.
To learn more, join us at B2B LeadsCon at the New York Hilton this August. The event begins on Aug. 22 with B2B Path2Conversion, a day long pre-conference event focusing on content marketing and SEO. The main B2B LeadsCon conference runs Aug. 23-24 and includes sessions on lead acquisition, nurturing, conversion, email marketing, social media and much more.
