In an ideal world, your marketing and sales teams are just two sides of the same coin, functioning in synchronized unity and reaping the benefits of perfected teamwork. But more often than not, the reality is that the two are barely on speaking terms and blaming each other when goals aren’t reached. Whether you have felt the impact yet or not, there is likely a gap between your marketing and sales teams, and your business is suffering for it.
The Breakdown of Marketing and Sales
Your marketing team excels at gathering leads, and your sales team lives for the close. But in between lies the task of prospecting, and this is where things get messy. Marketing understands target personas, lead generation funnels and parts of the customer journey, but some teams fail to translate successful marketing metrics into successful selling metrics. Sales teams, on the other hand, hate prospecting and want to focus on closing, hitting goals and making money.
Tension stirs between the two teams as marketing believes their work is being marginalized as no one follows up on leads. Sales feels that the leads marketing generates aren’t qualified leads to begin with and a waste of time. Frustration grows, time and resources are wasted, and motivation plummets.
Where Is the Gap Forming?
As this tension builds, the gap widens. A lack of pertinent data-sharing between marketing and sales causes confusion and loss of productive direction. Often, marketing has reporting which shows why the leads are good and conversely, sales has reporting which makes a case that the leads are suspect. In addition, too many clutter tasks are given to the internal sales team, making them less efficient, less focused and less productive. Research has shown that, on average, sales teams spend a whopping two-thirds of their time on non-revenue-generating tasks. It doesn’t take much to make the connection and understand that this directly translates into a significant, daily stream of lost revenue opportunities for you and your company.
Neither sales nor marketing want to engage and prospect and when they are required to do so, turnover rates skyrocket as job satisfaction takes a nose dive. This toxic cycle creates a negative work environment, frustration with leadership and a company culture that no one wants to be a part of.
No one is happy. No one wins.
The Ultimate Growth Hack: Enter the Sales Experience Partner
If it isn’t profitable for sales or marketing to prospect, the solution is simple: don’t make them. More and more companies are outsourcing specific business processes to companies committed solely to that work. There are three ways in particular that a sales experience (SX) partner serves to bridge the gap between your sales and marketing teams.
1. Focused Teams
Allow each team to focus on what they do best: marketing can focus on marketing and lead generation, and sales can focus on closing. With a dedicated sales experience partner in between, you remove the weight of repetitive, non-value-add tasks completely, leveling the playing field. Everyone has their own specific role and job to perform, and they can now do those jobs well and profitably. This has the added benefit of heightening employee satisfaction and creating a workplace culture that your team is actually excited to be a part of.
2. Targeted Remarketing
After integrating with your team, your sales experience partner re-engages with unmined leads or former clients that have fallen through the cracks and can quickly qualify and move potential revenue streams down your pipeline, increasing the efficiency of both marketing and sales. They take on all of the time-consuming work of cold calling, emailing, relationship building and lead nurturing that would have previously bogged down your teams.
3. Comprehensive Reporting
The success of the future depends on how you act on the data you receive today. Marketing needs more to work with than sales numbers. How are sources converting? What is the contact rate on the leads you’ve generated? What are your conversion rates and costs per lead? You want a clear picture of your cost per acquisition, so you can manage and reduce it. Taking this information and backing into the numbers creates a clear roadmap for troubleshooting areas that are lacking and making the most of high-performing opportunities.
Making It Work Financially
By setting your teams up for success and incentivizing and tracking the right metrics, you optimize each team to do their jobs with focused skill. Sales members are free to be tasked with taking on the most productive, revenue-generating business opportunities. Sales cut overhead costs, and profitability increases.
If you’re similar to our clients, you’re likely spending millions per month on advertising and marketing. The marketing dollars are spent to acquire leads for your sales team. The leads generated are yours whether you monetize them or not. In an ideal scenario, the investments you make in getting eyes on your business should convert into qualified sales opportunities for your sales team. The better you engage with your audience, the more that higher contact rate will turn into higher sales conversion and higher ROI on your marketing spend.
The prospects who express interest in your products or services today are “in market” now. It’s up to you to beat your competition to the close.
