Collaboration and building a unified revenue team enable sales and marketing to work together to accomplish shared goals and objectives.
With both teams operating in sync and sharing responsibility, the outcomes typically include:
According to Marketo, companies become 67% better at closing deals when sales and marketing teams are in sync.
According to MarketingProfs, companies with aligned sales and marketing teams generated 208% more revenue from marketing.
So throw your old Marketing Team™ and Sales Team™ t-shirts into the donation box to make room for new - and better - team swag : Team Revenue™!
Sound too good to be true? That’s because this doesn’t just happen by putting on the same clever t-shirt (although it doesn’t hurt 😉). Instead, it takes communication, hard work, and focus.
✨ The good news? Splash has successfully created our own Revenue Team, and we’re happy to share some tips to help you get started! ✨
Let's face it - marketing needs sales, and sales needs marketing. Adopting a team mentality ensures everyone is working toward a shared goal: revenue generation. When sales and marketing teams are aligned, companies see an average of 19% faster revenue growth and 15% profitability.
So when collaborating on events, set goals and metrics that everyone understands - including the expected ROI of the event. You should also include other metrics, based on your team’s priorities
✨ Hint: Think SQL's, Opportunities created, Pipeline generated, etc.✨
A shared definition of MQLs and SQLs is crucial for effective alignment, ensuring marketing delivers qualified leads and sales can easily convert into customers.
👉 This alignment eliminates most of the "finger-pointing" when marketing gets blamed for providing "bad leads," and sales get blamed for not nurturing leads enough.
There's a good reason why Sales & Marketing typically exist as two different departments: each has its areas of expertise, strengths, and even common personality traits.
Salespeople tend to be strong communicators and are primarily customer-facing. These traits make them great event hosts!
Marketers tend to be well-organized; they are usually the ringleaders for all the meetings, calls, event logistics, etc.
✨ Acknowledging each other's strengths and recognizing that each plays a vital role in the event planning process is essential. ✨
Sales teams possess several other strengths that can benefit marketing efforts. During event planning, Marketers should aim to leverage some of these:
Sales teams have direct interactions with customers and prospects daily and gather valuable insights about needs, pain points, objections, and preferences.
🤔 Sharing these insights with the marketing team can help shape marketing campaigns, messaging, and content to better resonate with the target audience.
Sales teams can provide valuable inputs to marketing teams, enabling them to develop more targeted and effective marketing strategies and campaigns. But how do you get this feedback if communication isn’t strong?
✨ Spoiler: you don’t. ✨
To achieve mutual success: Promote a collaborative culture where both teams actively engage in open-minded listening, offering and receiving feedback, advice, and suggestions, while prioritizing customer needs.
Open communication builds trust, fostering a cohesive revenue team aligned for success.
Encourage regular and constructive feedback between sales and marketing teams.
Sales can provide input to marketing on lead quality, content effectiveness, and customer insights.
Marketing can share feedback on sales collateral, lead nurturing efforts, and campaign impact.
👏 This feedback loop helps both teams improve their strategies and effectively align their efforts.
Develop and maintain a centralized repository of sales enablement resources, including product collateral, customer case studies, competitive insights, and training materials. Make these resources easily accessible to both sales and marketing teams to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration.
👏 Remember, fostering open communication requires a culture of trust, respect, and shared goals. Encourage collaboration and celebrate successes that result from effective sales and marketing alignment.
Congrats! You now have concrete ways to unify your sales and marketing teams into a combined revenue team, aligned with common goals and objectives.
Being like-minded is much less painful than hitting your head against a brick wall. And the positive results will motivate your teams to keep up the excellent work.
There’s still more to this conversation, though.
Next up, we'll explore tactical ways you can grow your revenue team. Need help figuring out where to start? We've got examples of what that can look like. You might even say there's a formula...
By joining forces into a single revenue team, sales and marketing can create streamlined processes and maximize the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, lead generation efforts, and sales techniques, thus creating TEAM REVENUE™ (t-shirts not included).
Stay tuned to keep the momentum going.
