Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams Playing Nice?

Successful businesses cultivate a spirit of teamwork, but even when leaders try diligently to get their employees to see themselves as a team, friendly competition can turn into rivalries or worse.

For some reason, sales and marketing teams tend to fall into this trap.

When your sales and marketing teams aren’t playing nice, disruption, miscommunications, and hard feelings can interfere with your business’s success. 

What can you do to get your sales and marketing teams to work together for the benefit of your business? Here are a few ideas.

 

Give Them the Big Picture

Most of us go to work each day with a few specific tasks to accomplish. Our field of vision is fairly narrow, and it’s easy to start looking at colleagues as either allies or barriers to our progress and success. 

If your leadership can frequently remind employees of the bigger picture, they can begin to see how their specific tasks contribute to the overall success of the business. Likewise, they will see how the contributions of other employees are essential. With this kind of vision, your sales and marketing teams will have a greater appreciation for the work each team offers.

There are several ways you can help your employees to see the big picture. You can begin meetings by reinforcing your business’s mission statement and giving a report about the overall progress of your organisation. You can also praise the contributions of different employees and explain how their work adds to the overall value of the company.

 

 

Talk About “Smarketing”

The catchphrase “smarketing” refers to alignment between your sales and marketing teams. By frequently talking about smarketing, you can help your two teams to see how their communication is vital to company success. 

In order to make this talk worthwhile, create measurable goals for each team, and share accountability for the goals between the two teams. For example, you can have your marketing team create a goal for leads, and your sales team will need to agree to follow up on those leads. This helps your marketing and sales teams to avoid the “blame game,” and it creates a level of mutual respect and teamwork. 

Instead of trying to get your sales and marketing teams to compete with each other (they already do), think of ways to get them to work together. Perhaps it would be helpful to have them all meet together occasionally to talk about areas in which their communication breaks down. The sales team needs to know what the current marketing strategies aim to do, and the marketing team needs the insight of the sales force in order to craft effective campaigns.

With sales and marketing employees that work well together, you’ll be able to move forward with your business strategy and make strides to achieving your goals. Feel free to reach out to us with questions about business strategy or issues.

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