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Marketing & Sales Teams in Concert

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Scott Moss
May 14, 2020
April 30, 2020

Back on March 31st, I wrote about the importance of marketing and sales teams working hand-in-hand for optimal revenue growth. I closed that post by suggesting the first step is to get the marketing leader in a room with the sales leader so they can white-board lead flow from marketing to sales.

But what else needs to occur so that lead funnel management is not just process-driven, but also collaborative among the teams? Well, I think the concept of two disparate teams needs to be reworked. I'm not promoting that they become one team. Far from it. Each group has a distinct and valuable set of skills and expertise that they collectively have honed over many years. What I am strongly promoting is that there be shared goals over the short- medium- and long-term that are consistently reviewed and for which the teams are measured against and then rewarded.

Having mutually-shared performance goals is not a novel approach to creating closer relationships between departments within a company for the betterment of the whole. However, it is a challenging proposition to put into practical application. So, how does one get started? Give the next paragraph a read for one way.

Now that the leaders of the sales and marketing teams are officially friendly collaborators, they should extend their whiteboard session to include the identification of KPIs that affect each team. Some examples might be: percent of Leads that convert to Marketing Qualified, velocity of moving from Marketing Qualified to actual Opportunity, average number of times Sales Qualified Leads are touched before they progress down the funnel, and funnel abandonment percent by stage. These are only a few but I'm sure you get the gist because they can tie back to each team. Now you have to set the benchmark numbers and corresponding goals, timeframe to attain them, review period frequency, and of course rewards.

That's all I've got for today. Feel free to leave constructive comments as you see fit. Here's to all small businesses Achieving Greatness.