How B2B Companies Can Break Down the Wall Between Marketing and Sales
Whether they’re figurative or literal, walls that stand in between marketing and sales teams can stifle a B2B company’s ability to generate, nurture and close leads, which has implications for the bottom line.
According to research from Huthwaite, a sales and marketing performance training firm, nearly 75 percent of B2B companies that define their sales and marketing teams as aligned are experiencing what the company calls “break-away success.” Meanwhile, 22 percent of companies that are breaking away from the pack strongly agree that sales and marketing collaboration has boosted revenue.
Here are some ways B2B organizations can break down the wall between marketing and sales to improve conversions and, ultimately, the bottom line.
Communicate
“Internal communication is critical when launching marketing campaigns,” says Nicole Kimmick, owner and managing director of NTK Consulting LLC. “If sales management isn’t aware or doesn’t support a marketing campaign, they are not going to be able to effectively manage their sales teams for the follow-up and closing of those leads.”
Marketing has to build a feedback loop in order to know whether what they’re doing is actually working for sales. “Push past the anecdotes and discover what’s at the core by asking the five whys,” says Shawn LaVana, vice president of marketing at Postwire. “You’ll be able to find trends this way, assess if the content you’ve built so far is on target, map content to each stage of the process and determine what else you need to develop to assist with sales efforts.”
Share
Marketers should also freely share the data they have with sales. “When data is siloed, when it’s jealously guarded by a marketing department, customer insights are hidden from the sales team and other parts of the organization,” says Bryan Pearson, president and CEO of LoyaltyOne and author of “The Loyalty Leap for B2B: Turning Customer Information Into Customer Intimacy.”
Anyone in marketing who has their hands on valuable customer information should be looking to foster conversations with sales. “Imagine a marketer saying, ‘How can the customer information I have change the way you think about sales decisions?'” Pearson says.
Sharing this data yields more intimacy with target buyers, especially in B2B. Pearson notes that B2B companies have a bigger opportunity for this intimacy because their customer bases are smaller than those for B2C companies, which enables them to know more about them.
“B2B companies that break down the walls and share data can stand apart from those that try to compete on price or innovation because they connect with the customer on an emotional level,” according to Pearson.
Devin Meister, manager of content and promotions for Cincom Systems, also says that marketers must compare and share the customer data they collect with sales. “It provides an objective way to validate everyone’s efforts.”
Understand and listen
Looking back on his company before it knocked down the wall between sales and marketing, Meister says he sees now that he was fooled into thinking that the two sides were connecting. “I thought we were doing good work, but a lot of it seemed hypothetical.”
Now that sales and marketing are better connected, Meister says he’s more engaged and better understands the challenges that sales is facing, which helps the search for solutions.
“Really take the time to understand the processes sales is using and why,” Meister says. “Helping them understand our marketing automation systems and its capabilities, how and why it was different than their CRM system, was key.”
He adds that listening to sales has given marketing a better grasp of the actual issues customers are facing. “Being in marketing, it’s not always realistic to get out and talk to customers face-to-face every day. Sales is already doing it. We learned a lot from their conversations.”
Process
Kimmick says that organizations need to have clearly defined lead-flow processes that have buy-in from both sales and marketing
