Align your marketing and sales teams

1. Establish common goals that both your marketing and sales teams can work towards achieving to help each other succeed.

For example, both your marketing and sales departments strive to increase customer retention and revenue, but to achieve those goals, each team needs to work closely with the other for it to work. Your marketing team attracts and nurtures leads to hand off to the sales team, who will benefit from more qualified leads and be able to close more sales. In turn, your sales team will be able to gather more valuable information about customers that both teams can use to optimize their strategies and effectively generate more conversions and revenue.

2. Create your buyer personas together to make sure both teams agree upon and understand who your target audience is.

Both the marketing and sales teams will have different perspectives and valuable information to contribute. This will help create synergy between the teams as they manage the overall experience for your prospects, leads, and customers. Create profiles of these personas and make them accessible to both teams. For example, you can use Google Drive or a CRM to store profiles and grant access to both teams.

3. Develop your sales and marketing teams’ strategies and processes together to ensure both plans support each other during every stage of your customers’ buyer journey.

This will make your marketing and sales teams each work more efficiently, but it will also help you better identify what your prospects, leads, and customers need so you can create better solutions for them, no matter where they are in your sales funnel. Developing and agreeing upon how each team will interact with the other can help you streamline your collaborative efforts and work more efficiently together. Consider holding regular collaboration meetings to continue optimizing your strategies to keep pace with changing market trends.

4. Leverage CRM software that allows you to share detailed customer profiles and feedback across your marketing and sales teams.

Using CRM software will help reduce miscommunication about customer accounts between your marketing and sales teams. It can help your business provide a better experience for each customer, as your teams will be able to communicate more easily and hand off detailed information for each lead seamlessly. Some popular CRMs include: HubSpot. Zoho. Streak for Gmail. Salesforce.

5.  Use consistent messaging across your sales and marketing strategies.

Making sure everyone is on the same page about specific recommendations and solutions that will be offered between your marketing and sales teams will help avoid confusing or frustrating your customers. For example, if one person on your marketing team tells a customer that a certain feature or solution is available, and then they get transferred to a member of your sales team who tells them something completely different, the customer is going to be understandably confused or upset.

6. Combine post-sale efforts so that your marketing and sales teams can continue collaborating to build customer retention and increase growth.

Even after your team closes a sale, both marketing and sales should continue to nurture that customer relationship to lead them back through your sales funnel for more products and services or upsells. The more customers you can convert and retain, the more sales and revenue your teams can generate together for your business.