Marketing & Sales: what is the problem and how to solve it – PART 1

The eternal battle between sales and marketing is long gone. In all companies there is, in a way, a rivalry between these two departments that are crucial to the success of any institution.

Marketing has in itself several responsibilities. One of them is capturing potential interested in the product or service we are selling.

Sales has the responsibility of turning a potential customer into an effective customer.

The functions of each area are well delineated, the big problem lies in the lack of joint collaboration between them. Sales complain that the leads generated are not qualified and that quantity is privileged over quality.

Marketing, on the other hand, argues that the big problem is the commercial team, which does not have the capacity to convert someone who has already expressed an interest in obtaining more information.

But after all, are there half-truths or is one side absolutely right?

In the vast majority of cases, the problem is not found on either side of the field, but in the lack of collaboration and communication between Marketing and Sales.

Let’s take a look at one of the many cases I’ve come across in my career: a potential customer when seeing a campaign on facebook leaves their data in order to receive more information about our product.

This lead is forwarded to the sales department with an indication of when it was generated and with the suggestion to be contacted as soon as possible since it is a “hot” lead. The sales department, having received a lead who has expressed an interest in receiving more information, tries to get in touch with the lead, but to no avail. The attempt is repeated 3 more times. The result always ends up being the same.

After several attempts to make a phone call, sales decided to send an email indicating that they had received information that they were interested in knowing more about our product and that, therefore, we understood that it was best to schedule a meeting to discuss the theme.

In this small process it is possible to immediately identify several faults.

1) sending a lead to the commercial team without contextualizing the original campaign;

2) with this information it would be possible for the commercial team to have knowledge of the age margin and thus define the best channel to get the information to it;

1) Without trying to find out the origin campaign, you can’t know exactly what caught the lead’s attention;

2) Rarely, nowadays, a lead who simply filled out a form on the internet with the indication that she would like to receive more information, is interested in receiving a phone call (varies from age to age) with a proposal to sell the product;

These are just some of the many problems that occur in the day-to-day of several companies that try to attract more customers. And you can see why it’s so difficult for us to remember just from memory a company that has given us excellent customer service, from the first to the last moment.

But how to improve collaboration?

This goes through 4 points that, in my experience, are fundamental and that without these, no sales and marketing team will be able to work in a fully optimized way:

1) Constant information sharing

2) Feedback per campaign

3) Create a Buyer Persona together

4) Identify content flaws in Customer Journey