Removing Silos Between Sales and Marketing

What Challenges Create Silos?

The end goal for both sales and marketing is to increase profit for their organization. However, their methods of achieving that goal may vary. In sales, it’s simple: did a department reach its sales targets or not? Marketing is more opaque, and it can be difficult to quantify the correlation between the department’s promotion, brand and advertising efforts, as well as client acquisition.

Research shows that 76% of marketers who collaborate with sales teams say they understand the customer journey better, with 71% reporting they’re able to more effectively address customer needs as a result.

There are a number of digital tools that are helpful in increasing efficiencies across functions and in working with customers. For example, Marketo’s¹ Sales Connect tool increases sales productivity by providing marketing teams with visibility into sales initiatives, allowing them to drive more personalized customer engagements. And there’s no shortage of ways to streamline team communications. For instance, Slack¹ enables seamless communication between teams through designated in-app messaging channels, making work simpler and more productive.

Thirty-one percent of business leaders make new, digital workplace tools accessible for employees and expect them to lead to improvements in workplace processes.

When companies tighten their spending, this may result in even more pressure to achieve results. On the marketing side, tighter budgets require justifying each initiative; for sales, it can mean fewer follow-ups. Each function wants to demonstrate its value to the company, but cuts in spending can cause roadblocks in efficiency.

How Businesses Can Remove Silos From Their Organizations

According to LinkedIn, companies with well-aligned sales and marketing functions experience 36% higher customer retention rates and are 24% faster at growing revenue.

Automation increases efficiency. Organizations can automate tasks such as email blasts and newsletters, to focus on more in-depth campaigns that target the right people. According to research conducted by Invesp, marketing automation can increase conversion rates by as much as 77%. Before starting with automation, it’s important to define campaign objectives and consider audience personas. The groups are not identical, so messaging for each must be tailored accordingly. It’s also best to start small before working up to more complex, multi-layered campaigns.

Even though organizations are using automation more frequently, salespeople still maintain the strongest relationships with customers. Salespeople must communicate with marketing in order for a business to thrive. Sales representatives can help answer these key questions:

• What do customers like about the company’s product or service?
• What are they concerned about?
• What were the best and worst parts of the sales process?

By understanding audience personas and sharing that information across functions, an organization can better focus its efforts on the right people. It can also use a few other methods to bring more cohesion across the business:

• Bring marketing and sales together to share common business goals and report progress to leadership regularly. This frequent face-to-face action helps remove the isolation caused by silos.
• Create a “smarketing” department that combines the functions of sales and marketing to help keep both sides accountable. For example, an organization may provide incentives for marketing to contribute a certain amount of qualified leads into the sales pipeline.
• Develop lead scoring to determine a lead’s “sale-readiness.” This is effective in strengthening the revenue cycle, but only if sales and marketing work in tandem to develop the scorecard.
• Utilize account-based marketing, whereby a smaller number of key prospects or customer accounts receive personalized marketing strategies instead of a larger, more general campaign.
• Align marketing content with sales-identified segments to improve the quality of targets and leads.