Want to alleviate friction and frustration with your sales team?
Having an aligned objective will create a smoother journey
Marketing, understandably, wants to prioritise building brand awareness and equity, but the reality is, this doesn’t always result in leads. And if sales don’t have enough leads or the assets to convert leads, invariably frustration and friction arises. Sales will blame marketing and marketing will blame sales. When actually, most likely, neither are to blame.
The solution? Having the right conversations. Sales and marketing need to come together to communicate what they need, how they need it and how they’re going to support each other. Because when there is a disconnect it can lead to wasting resources.
Focus on structure to prevent wasting resources
Neither marketing nor sales (actually anyone!) wants to spend hours in futile meetings. Yet, equally, you don’t want to get to the end of the month and find that sales haven’t had the materials or information needed to close deals, because due to a disconnect marketing hadn’t been made aware. It’s a fine balancing act between having too many resources and not enough, but it can be achieved through structure. Structuring meetings, systems, responsibilities and the organisation, so that the business’s performance is consistently improving.
Think about the bigger strategic picture
You want to be successful in sales but sometimes when chasing business you need to take a step back, forget the emotion of closing and ask yourself, ‘is this the right client for our business from a strategic perspective?’. Why? Because strategically it’s much more difficult to dig the business back out of a reputation situation if you’ve been working with the wrong clients and, potentially, letting them down. Hence why it’s so important for every department to know exactly what the business’ value is and who it is delivered to. Marketing can then communicate your message clearly and sales can focus their attention on the right audience.
Now watch this...
It’s time for a deeper dive into the good stuff. We’ve spoken to some of the BlueOcean team from four different departments to find out their perspective, which you can watch below.
By now you’ve probably come to realise we’re big on learning from other departments outside our own. So if you work in marketing and only have a couple of minutes spare, check out the sales perspective and vice versa. Better yet, grab a coffee and watch them all.