Sales, Silos, and Strategies

How to create stronger relationships between sales and marketing teams

In 2019, our sales and marketing teams took a more proactive approach in developing a stronger strategic partnership. As a result, we developed an email strategy that allowed us to nurture hundreds of contacts into hot leads for the sales team to pursue.  This cross-department partnership drove a significant increase in partner revenue.  

Then COVID-19 hit. Our teams began working from home, and we started to see the silo working behavior creep into our workdays. The cross-team collaboration required more focus and effort to stay connected.  

As we’re approaching a full year of virtual work, we’ve found new ways to collaborate. Efforts like weekly status meetings and monthly brainstorming sessions has helped break down barriers and has led to a more successful outlook for both teams.  

Prioritizing a cross-team strategy between marketing and sales is essential to the success of your organization. When the teams are in sync, it will help to: 

• Generate more sales opportunities 
• Improve efficiencies & productivity 
• Drive increased revenue  

When the sales team started looking for new revenue channels for our virtual events, this opened the gates for several marketing and sales partnership ideas that would help us drive revenue over the coming months.  

Three ways for your sales and marketing teams to improve cross-department workflows:  

Define the challenges. 

One of the biggest challenges our sales team faced was bandwidth. Their prospect list was made up of thousands of contacts, and they didn’t have a robust lead list to leverage. Together, our sales and marketing teams launched Pardot, an email platform that integrates with Salesforce. This platform enabled the sales team to send large lead lists through an automated campaign funnel, identifying interest based on engagement. This workflow and funnel allowed marketing to do the heavy lifting so they could focus on closing sales.  

Don’t stay stagnant. 

After we saw success with the email funnel lead campaign, we knew we could continue to elevate our strategy with the sales team. We shifted our emailing campaign platform to a more dynamic and affordable tool, implemented new offerings for partners during the pandemic, and continue to meet frequently with partners and the sales team to provide insights into what is working and what’s not. We are constantly reviewing our email content and adjusting in real-time to keep it relevant to our readers. 

Diversify partner offerings.

We have many great offerings for our partners from email sponsorships and webcast opportunities, to event sponsorships and year-round website features. A tool we have added to the docket in 2021 is a digital ad sales platform. In this platform, we will be able to offer our partners the ability to serve ads to our specific site visitors and community members. This allows our partners to stay dynamic and top of mind, while providing our members with relevant ads based on their interest in our user community. This new offering is expected to grow revenue and increase partner satisfaction while streamlining communications with partners. 

The relationship between the sales and marketing teams is the key to increased revenue for your organization. By encouraging a sales and marketing team partnership, assessing your approach, and diversifying your offerings, your partner relationships and annual revenue are sure to improve.