5 Proven Communication Strategies for Sales and Marketing

Here’s how it goes: Your marketing team focuses on increasing lead volume by all means and passes all inbound leads to sales without worrying to qualify them properly. In turn, sales will avoid communicating their feedback on the quality of inbound leads leaving marketing ignorant about the poor outcome of their work.

As a result, marketing will keep generating low-quality leads that sales can’t convert at a high rate.

So how can sales and marketing communicate effectively? In this article, we’ll share 5 tips on streamlining their communication.

5 tips to improve communication for sales and marketing

To get both teams to work as one, you have to establish a specific framework that nurtures collaboration. Here are some ideas that you can experiment with.

1. Choose the right tools

Offering your team the right tools can help empower them to work towards a common goal. A variety of software can help facilitate the work of sales and marketing in your organization. Let’s review a couple.

One of them is mentoring software that can help both teams to get the necessary advice from established experts who have the right skill set to solve miscommunication issues.

Remember that your business needs are unique and your teams will have to work out their formula for cooperation. Getting external help from a mentor can accelerate this learning process and set your sales and marketing departments to success.

Your CRM is another example of a tool that facilitates collaboration. It’s usually the sales team that fills in the data and uses it to track the pipeline daily. But you should also encourage your marketing team to utilize it.

For example, reviewing the sales pipeline will help them learn what inbound leads ended up buying. As a result, they get a clearer idea of the company’s ideal client.

2. Hold regular strategic meetings

Regular strategic meetings are the best time for both teams to touch base on their activities, progress boards and get all necessary advice from colleagues. Your teams can use this time to conceptualize any joint activities for generating, nurturing and closing leads.

For example, your sales department can collaborate with marketing on event organization this way. A marketing team can promote the event on LinkedIn, set up a landing page to sign up leads, and create email nurturing sequences.

Together with the sales team, they can set up the criteria for lead segmentation. As they identify hot leads, sales executives can effectively reach out to them during the event and increase their chances of selling products.

3. Work on your KPIs together

Marketing and sales work on different KPIs. For example, the sales team can often focus on achieving the sales quota to stabilize the cash runway, while the marketing can aim to bring more traffic to their core landing pages.

Marketing often prioritizes the top and middle of the funnel content, while sales prioritize the bottom. However, sales often rely on marketing to generate high-quality inbound leads. It’s marketing that does all the heavy lifting to move leads from the awareness stage to the point where sales take over communication.

While the teams will have different tasks, they both aim to achieve the same goal — boosting the company's revenue. To do so, both teams have to create a common strategy where they define how they combine their KPIs to move closer to the common goal.

Having one Excel sheet with both teams’ metrics is the first step to closer collaboration. It will help the teams review how their effort relates to each other’s KPIs and identify the area in need of improvement.

4. Nurture collaborative learning

Collaborative learning is a methodology focused on employees sharing their knowledge and learning from one another. Thanks to collaborative learning, your sales and marketing teams can effectively exchange knowledge that’ll contribute to more effective lead acquisition and nurturing processes.

Unlike top-down management, collaborative learning supports the bottom-up approach in teams. For example, top-down management involves the heads of departments setting up objectives for courses or other learning initiatives. The success of the programs is measured by implementing a course, but not the impact of it on achieving common objectives.

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By implementing collaborative learning, you let marketing and sales teams decide on their learning needs as a team, come up with ideas on bringing them forward, and measure success based on how learning initiatives impact the achievement of a company's KPIs. This approach is more democratic and inclusive that will empower each member of your sales and marketing teams.

5. Introduce content collaboration

Your sales and marketing teams can work together to identify content gaps that hurt client journey and conversion rate. They should identify the profitable revenue-generating channels — blog, Instagram, LinkedIn or referrals.

Reviewing the content types across these channels can become their next step. If you find out that most inbound leads churn at the bottom of your marketing funnel, it means you have to create more customer interviews and case studies to build more trust with new prospects.

The engagement of your sales department in the process of content curation will be indispensable. It’s sales reps and account managers who communicate with clients the most and can help you collect the necessary information you need to publish a case study.

Final thoughts

Misalignment of sales and marketing teams can lead to depleted control over achieving the company's key goals including driving revenue. By working out a strategy to get both teams to cooperate, you can generate more engaged leads that convert at a higher rate. Hopefully, the tips and ideas we have presented will make this process easier for you.