4 Ways to Earn New Business

Your sales and marketing departments are two of the driving forces behind your organization meeting their revenue goals. And while they may not be the Capulets and the Montagues, there can oftentimes be misalignment between the two departments, leading to a lack of results. 

By building a bridge between these two departments, your organization can create a strategic plan to align internal KPIs, increase collaboration and introduce new tools that allow for information sharing across departments. Below are Koch Comm’s four tips for creating a healthy relationship between your sales and marketing departments.  

Create One Goal For Both Teams 

Your sales and marketing goals should be one in the same. To align these, start with your revenue goals and decide how much growth you are looking for as a company. Next, move on to your sales team’s goals. Some questions to ask as you build these sales goals: 

• What is your average deal size? 
• How many deals will it take to hit your company’s revenue goal? 
• What is your sales team’s close rate? 
• Based on that close rate, how many opportunities need to be added to your pipeline to close that many deals?

After these questions are answered, share that information with your marketing team, especially the number of opportunities needed. From there, your marketing team can take these goals and turn them into a marketing strategy and include tactics to reach and guide your audience through the funnel.  

Make Space For Open Dialogue 

Most organizations keep their most candid meetings within their own department. This siloed approach not only depletes culture but also prevents cross-department problem-solving. By allowing space for your sales and marketing teams to openly discuss pain points, you are allowing space for great innovation.  

To our fellow marketers: Never forget – your sales team is the greatest source of information on what pain points your customers are experiencing. They are the frontline workers offering solutions to your audience, and they understand the pain points that brought those individuals to your organization. If your marketing team is not involving the sales team as strategies and tactics are being discussed, vital information is being missed. Cross-team collaboration is the key to creating innovative solutions for your clients. 

Score Your Leads 

You know your audience, right? What about your ideal customer? Do you know them? Knowing and understanding your ideal customer as well as what makes them ideal is the first step in lead scoring.  

After you’ve identified the characteristics of your ideal customer, it’s time to develop a rating system that converts these characteristics into quantitative scores. A lead scoring system creates a common vernacular that the two teams can share so that both understand what success looks like and what it doesn’t look like. Ask your sales team to assign leads scores as prospective clients and customers meet certain criteria. Then bring your marketing team into the mix. By allowing your marketing team the opportunity to understand your sales team’s lead scoring system, they can optimize their marketing efforts to help support the sales team’s goals.

Introduce A Shared Customer Relationship Management Tool 

Just like you wouldn’t ask your sales team to never talk to your marketing team, you don’t want both of these departments working in separate tools. Having your teams operate in different systems, a sales-only CRM and a marketing-only platform, is not only expensive but inefficient. Shared sales and marketing ecosystems allow for a seamless partnership between the two efforts. Systems like HubSpot, allow all your marketing and sales efforts to co-exist. As a HubSpot certified partner, we have repeatedly seen the benefits of unifying your data, contacts, leads and efforts, even going so far as to integrate existing systems and tools for our clients. 

Tools like HubSpot also allow for more granular reporting between your sales and marketing teams, like the ability to attribute your marketing efforts with actual sales conversions. By allowing your departments to operate in silos, you also create fragmented data. As a result, high-level decisionmakers lose the ability to see the full picture and understand where breakdowns are occurring. Layering in analytics data from both departments in unified dashboards is a key component to successful ongoing decision making. 

No One Said Relationships Were Easy 

At Koch Comm, we value helping people above all things. If your organization needs support with your marketing efforts, implementing a customer relationship management tool or deciding what’s next, we’d love to meet with you. Till then, we’ll be at happy hour with our sales team.