Sales and Marketing Collaboration: Your Growth Multiplier

“Customers don’t care where marketing and sales begin and end, they want one seamless experience.”

               -PATH study participant

According to our research, 80% of customers are more likely to use a business if they offer personalized experiences. Separate, sales and marketing have important and powerful perspectives on their customers. But their individual perspectives alone aren’t enough to deliver what the customer wants. The magic happens when sales and marketing put their information together.

Sales and Marketing collaboration is your growth multiplier – the thing that builds the kind of competitive advantage that drives companies to outperform the market. Sales and Marketing are key to understanding customer experience – no one is positioned better within the organization than these two functions. If both departments have the full picture of their customers' wants, needs, and goals, they can understand more about their customers and turn that into action faster than the competition. Don’t just take our word for it, the American Customer Satisfaction Index proves that a powerful focus on customers can deliver huge impact – up to 1000% more growth!

The good thing is everyone agrees that collaboration is important. In a recent national study we did at PATH with almost 200 Sales and Marketing leaders, 82% of respondents felt collaboration was of the highest importance.

So what’s the problem? Our national Sales and Marketing leader study also made the challenge clear. Sales and Marketing come from two distinctly different perspectives. We heard feedback like:

• The problem with Sales is they “often believe that Marketing’s role is to make things pretty, not to be at the table making strategic decisions about customers.”
• The problem with Marketing is that they “believe that Sales rarely executes on its carefully laid plans and is too hyper-focused on individual prospects to have awareness of the greater market.”

There’s a lot of friction to overcome.

We’re happy to say that a very clear solution emerged from those same conversations. Collaboration is hard, but not impossible. The Salespeople and Marketers that were doing it best – and getting the results that proved it – built collaboration in three steps:

1. First, they built trust by proving Sales and Marketing value to each other in every interaction.
2. Second, they drove consistency with shared systems and insights that align on the best customers and markets.
3. Finally, they focused on the customer to seamlessly integrate and outperform the market.

“The buyer’s journey has changed so much over the past 10 years. Phone calling doesn’t work, people aren’t opening emails, you’re not allowed to show up at their office. Traditional ways don’t work anymore. You have to be where they are looking and know what they’re looking for – and that takes integration from start to finish.” -PATH study participant

Strain between sales and marketing takes energy and focus away from long-term growth. Creating a process that encourages collaboration and sharing information is key to achieving the company’s goals and growing revenue.

Whether you’re just getting started or have been collaborating for a while, remember to simplify, simplify, simplify. Ask yourselves these questions:

• Are Sales and Marketing meeting and sharing enough as teams to have strong and solid trust? If not, how can we do this better?
• Are your systems – technology and more - empowering alignment about our best customers? If not, how can we consistently cut out the noise and align better?
• Are we constantly learning from each other and taking action on what matters? If not, how can we work to prioritize one action opportunity to drive more value for customers?

For a more comprehensive understanding, check out PATH’s Sales & Marketing Collaboration Model.