Five Ways to Ensure Your Sales Team is Not Aligned with Marketing

It might sound funny, but it’s amazing how many times the following scenarios play out in marketing departments. It isn’t due to bad intentions by the marketing team, but rather due to a team that is just running fast doing what they are doing, and not taking the time to stop and think about the value they are providing to the sales team.

I used to be one of those marketers myself. But when you get a chance to take a step back and look at these behaviors, it becomes quite obvious how much of a rift they are causing in marketing and sales alignment.

Take a look and see if you recognize any of these in your own team.

1. Define leads without getting sales input. I agree it is so much quicker to just do the legwork on your own. It can be hard to get the attention of the sales team. But how are they going to be aligned with the leads you send if they don’t buy into the definition of a lead?
2. Don’t provide anything other than demographic information when you send a lead to sales. Where do you draw the line between what marketing should do and what sales should do? Sales seems to want to control all of the communication, but yet they also need to work more efficiently to meet their quotas. The answer is that marketing should provide as much information as possible to sales to make their conversations and next steps more efficient.
3. Send the sales team all of the information about your campaigns before the campaign goes out and then get annoyed when they don’t know what the campaign is about. I’ve been so guilty of this in the past. It’s frustrating when you feel like you’ve said it ten times and no one is listening. But when you put yourself in your salesperson’s shoes, you can see that their main focus day-to-day is trying to make sales and make their quota. Your campaign is one little piece that doesn’t affect them until they get a lead from that campaign. They need just-in-time information.
4. Jump every time they ask for a brochure to support their sales efforts. Your sales team may love your marketing team because they are so responsive at creating stuff on demand. But just like if your kids ask for candy all the time, it’s not what they really need to make them successful. Taking the time to plan out content carefully that will support your prospects’ buy cycles will actually be more helpful to sales in the long run, even if they don’t like being told no in the short run.
5. Create your campaigns without sales input. Just like #1 above – it can slow your process when you need to get more input. But who actually has the best information about your customers and prospects? Who talks to them every day? And who needs to follow up on leads from the campaign? Those are the people who should have input.