5 Things Marketers Should Avoid to Keep Sales Happy
Natalie Johnson, Senior Director, Corporate Marketing, Salesforce
While the relationship between sales and marketing teams is closely tied and very interdependent, their approach to technology, metrics, and lead assessment can vary widely. Is your marketing team consequently (and unintentionally) making sales pull its hair out? Here are a few things your team should avoid to help keep sales and marketing working together like a well-oiled machine.
Quantity Over Quality Leads
This is vital because it’s the most common thing that marketing does — usually without meaning to — to annoy the sales team. Low-quality leads aren’t just leads that go cold. Instead, they’re leads that were never right for the sale to begin with.
Passing Leads with Incomplete or No Information
“What did they look at? What are they interested in?” are probably the most common questions that sales shoots back to marketing over a lead. If your answer as a marketer is “Good question!” it’s probably time to start looking at your marketing processes and implement more engagement tracking.
Not Evaluating the Right Tools
Marketers can often help their sales teams more than they think, and one of the ways they can be most helpful is by evaluating both marketing and sales technologies. Marketing is well placed to start evaluating tools that can help everyone, and improve some of the more inefficient parts of the lead-management process. Ultimately, marketing can help address problematic technologies before they cause too much damage.
Ignoring Closed Lines of Communication
What’s the easiest way for marketing and sales to have a great relationship? By simply talking to each other. Talking to your sales team and finding out what it’s using, sending, and hearing from customers is the only way to be sure you’re supporting them as needed. And when marketing understands what and why certain assets are working for sales, they can create campaigns to keep the asset in circulation and up to date. Win-win.
Forgetting Marketing’s Other Target Audience
Marketers: You don’t just have one audience that you need to target, you have two — your customers and your sales team. Marketing’s content, campaigns and personalized communications can help sales as much as it drives external leads. And who is better placed to offer sales the tools they need to speak to customers and prospects besides marketing?
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