The Game Plan: Why it's important to break down silos between marketing and sales

So many technology companies in Australia and New Zealand (and, well… everywhere in the world) invest shit tons of money into salespeople with varying degrees of success.

Hiring salespeople is one of the trickiest things to do in IT with so many specialties to be covered, such as business development, hunting, account managing, inside sales, transferable skills, ability to “fake-it-till-you-make-it”. So how can you reduce the risk of your sales person not being able to sell, while also bolstering their opportunities to close in the market?

This is where it’s time to reframe marketing as a strategic lever to improve and drive sales.

Sure, you might think of marketing as “fluffy” or “nice to have”, or something that IT businesses consider only once they’ve had a profitable year. So much of sales and marketing attribution is currently anecdotal based on personal perception. However, Directors can benefit greatly from the way marketing can facilitate the job of a hungry salesperson. When done right, marketing game plans = growth.

The Game Plan:

Marketing needs to think like sales,

and sales needs to think like marketing.

Real results happen when we tightly couple marketing and sales into a team effort with a rich strategy. How do we do this? Good question.

1. STRATEGY

Strategy is the key whether it's 3 months, 6 months, or 12 months. Building a strategy in a modular way allows for flexibility and agility to take on opportunities as the year goes on. These strategies are built with enough direction to stick to it, follow it, and see it through. It’s important to set common metrics and understandings of success within the sales, marketing, and wider business team so everyone is across exactly what is classified as a ‘successful’ campaign or marketing program. Without this, everyone has their own opinions and interpretations, and are very quick to judge.

2. COMMON GOALS

Sales and marketing need to speak the same language and understand “why” they’re doing something. The best performing teams we work with are the salespeople who know how to market, and the marketing people who know how to sell. Both teams need to intimately know each other’s roles, challenges, and customer bases. It’s exactly this that can be tied together with common goals - such as quarterly sales pipeline goals or net new lead acquisition goals, where responsibilities are shared across the wider team.

3. SHARED INCENTIVES

Who doesn’t love a bit of an incentive? When tied in with common goals, incentives for success can be offered as shared rewards for overall performance. This encourages more of a teamwork approach to sales and marketing and eliminates the “hogging the glory” component that can often follow a successful sales deal. If your sales and marketing team have a shared incentive, such as a bonus or team trip (for example), then working together and achieving these goals become rewarding on a personal and organisational level.

4. TECHNOLOGY

So many IT businesses want ROI from their marketing, but they don’t want to invest in the technology that will help distinguish that ROI. Most business leaders and salespeople believe it is one isolated event, for example, an outbound phone call that generates, accelerates and closes the deal without seeing that it took multiple digital interactions on websites, social media pages, downloads, ads, chatting to industry colleagues, listening to podcasts and watching customer testimonials, that actually helped shape the buying decision. Investing in marketing technology may set you back a couple of thousand a year, but it will give you dollar-for-dollar metrics on money in versus money out.

5. PROCESS

The marketing and sales scope is SO WIDE these days. This then means that standard internal sales and marketing teams are now running across multiple specialities in an ad hoc way trying to deliver on revenue goals. They try to create content, get customer videos, post socials, attend events, sales prospect, meet with customers, develop bespoke 1-page flyers; all on a whim. This is where marketing and sales process dominates.nThe importance of process, and fuelled by automation, means that your marketing and sales efforts can streamline together, avoid double ups, keep on brand and scale. As part of our customer work, we develop internal processes and methodologies for our customers to simplify and speed up marketing requests, lead follow up and sales turnaround.

6. COMPANY WIDE CHAMPIONING

Tying back to building a sales culture, all sales and marketing initiatives need to be championed by Executive Leadership and spread across the business. From sales, to engineering, delivery, DevOps and managed service teams - everyone needs to understand what the company is selling, how they’re selling it and why they’re selling it. We recommend running continual sales on-boarding and enablement sessions with your business and technical team to keep everyone in the know, which will ultimately make the sales process easier (i.e. you’ve already got pre-sales technical resources bought in) and will open up the doors for more leads and referrals from your team’s wider network.

At Techtent, we act as an extension of your internal team to work with you in achieving and implementing all of the above. We have deep subject matter expertise in technology marketing that will architect and implement marketing solutions that are compelling, scaleable and automated to drive sales and growth for your business.

To learn more or for your free proposal, contact us today!