Welcome to another installment of our Demand Generation vlog series. Today we’ll be talking about how your sales and marketing teams can collaborate to win when it comes to attracting and converting leads. Let’s get started! 

Sales & Marketing Collaboration: Key Benefits

The key to fostering collaboration between sales and marketing is recognizing that each of these teams is a half of a lead and demand generation whole. A business works better when these departments work together – a study from Marketo and Reachforce Research showed that tightly aligned sales and marketing teams are 67% better at closing deals.  

Another benefit of close collaboration is better service to your clients; no one knows your target market better than your sales team, which means they can be instrumental in creating content that speaks to their specific needs and pain points.  

Unfortunately, this level of teamwork is not a reality for most businesses. Time and resource constraints, a misunderstanding of daily responsibilities, and mismatched expectations are all obstacles standing in the way of sales and marketing harmony. 

But these obstacles are not insurmountable. With a little hard work, you can bring these teams together to create a lead generation power couple.  

How to Bring Teams Together

The first step to better collaboration is better communication and full transparency. Each team and its members need to understand where the other is coming from: What are their daily concerns and tasks? You need to create a healthy environment where everyone can share, discuss, and refine ideas. 

You also need to agree on who you’re talking to. A mutual understanding of your target audience can help create messaging that’s relevant and helpful to your ideal market. Buyer personas are very helpful in this process. 

Finally, both teams will need to work together to develop a process for handling incoming leads. Identify which metrics are important to both teams, and how those metrics will be reported. Figure out what makes a marketing qualified lead and how they graduate to the SQL level. Developing a service level agreement, or SLA, can help ensure that everyone’s expectations are met.  

So, what now? Once you’ve set the stage for a healthy sales and marketing relationship, you’re ready to put the real work in. The first step is to agree on your target audience, followed by developing messaging and content that speaks to that audience’s unique needs. You’ll also need to determine which channels to host that messaging on. As part of your SLA, determine a meeting schedule that works for key players on both sides, so progress updates happen at the right moments throughout the process. You might not get the cadence right on the first try, so don’t be afraid to adjust your schedule and the process as you go along. The important part is to work together to ensure that everyone’s needs and expectations are being met on both sides of the aisle. 

For more information on how sales and marketing collaboration can lead to better demand generation and how you can get started, check out our eBook: Demand Generation 2021: A Practical Guide for the Digital-First Era. And keep an eye out for the next installment in our vlog series, coming soon. 

Take a closer look at the key drivers of demand generation to create a custom attack plan for you business.