“Us v. Them”: How to Make Sales and Marketing Work Together

The days of the ‘us versus them’ mindset between sales and marketing teams are over. The way business operates today leaves no room for companies made up of teams that compete with each other – even if it’s just for glory and recognition. There’s too much competition happening in the marketplace for there to be competition within your business. That’s why sales and marketing enablement should be high up on your agenda. What do I mean by sales and marketing enablement? I’m talking about aligning your sales and marketing teams so that they start working together. After all, they’ve each got the same goal: to win customers and boost revenue.

Let me tell you how to make sales and marketing enablement happen in your business and the type of tools that can assist you.

Today marketing and sales can no longer afford to lock horns

Back in the old days (i.e. before the internet), businesses got away with having sales and marketing teams that fought like cats and dogs. These teams relied on aggressive marketing – cold calls and hard sells – to win business. The customer was nowhere near as important as the product or meeting sales targets. The evolution of inbound marketing has turned this paradigm on its head. The consumer now has the power – they’re armed with a significant resource that is forcing both sales and marketing to change their game: information. And with such a force to be reckoned with, sales and marketing enablement can only make the task of wooing these hard-to-get consumers easier.

With the right processes in place, your sales and marketing teams can become one super-human ‘smarketing’ team

The first step to making sales and marketing enablement a reality is to put processes in place that encourage the team sport of ‘smartketing’. For example, create a process whereby every proposal sent out to prospective clients by your sales team has a follow-up procedure (this can be automated easily using Pandadoc and a CRM like HubSpot). Data and analytics can then be collected about how well the proposal has been received, and with that data, your marketing team can review how well their strategies are working. If the proposals aren’t well received by prospective clients, the marketing team can devise a strategy to make them more effective.

The right tools are powerful enough to create peace among the fiercest of rivals

See how this relatively simple process has brought the sales and marketing teams together? This is the kind of positive ripple effect software can have on teams. All you need is the right document creation tool that can do things like tell you exactly whether your documents are being opened, which parts of your proposals are being read (document visibility), what your visibility to close rate is, whether contracts are being signed, and which integrate perfectly with your CRM system. Not only do you save heaps of time you would have spent on the nitty gritty of drawing up proposals in Word or PowerPoint (which don’t let you embed videos), you’re able to collect solid data that’ll bring your sales and marketing teams together.

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