Want True Sales and Marketing Integration? Go Beyond the Metrics

You say you want your sales and marketing teams working in tandem, but do you know what that really looks like? If you aren’t seeing true partnership at the tactical level you still have silos in your organization, and you aren’t getting the most from your sales and marketing teams.

Ask yourself these questions…

Is your marketing team only focused on things like SEO rankings, opt-in rates, number of downloads, or some other individual (possibly misleading, potentially meaningless) metric?

Is your sales team marching only to the beat of the revenue drum—only thinking about closed sales?

I am not saying these metrics aren’t important; they are. But the value in true integration and collaboration between sales and marketing isn’t necessarily one easy-to-measure thing.

Real collaboration between sales and marketing shows its greatest value when:

• A sales person is wise enough to ask their marketing counterpart what information they have about a particular market segment their client is in.
• A marketing person discovers and shares articles that help a sales person demonstrate industry knowledge or build relationships with their prospects.
• A sales person views their marketing counterpart as a trusted sounding board, asking for advice on crafting personal touch points to their key prospects.
• A marketing person looks at the sales person’s top prospect list and helps them identify contacts and build relationships with those contacts.

The longevity and growth potential of your business rely on sales and marketing teams working together beyond the metrics for which they are held accountable.

Here’s when you know you have arrived. The following is a real email exchange between a Marketing VP and Sales VP. Can you say the same is happening in your organization?

Message from Sales VP to Marketing VP: “BTW, I wanted to thank you again for the article that you suggested I tweet. I did tweet it today and I sent it out to my LinkedIn network. I am going to use it as a marketing touch to tee-up outbound calls to our prospects. You are a great partner!”

Response from Marketing VP: “We ARE a fabulous team!”