Working with your sales teams
SALES ENGAGEMENT
A recipe for working with your sales teams
Tension between sales and marketing teams is nothing new. For years, commercial managers have complained that marketing are not providing them with enough leads or the right collateral, while marketing teams say that sales are ignoring all the great content they are producing, or not acting on the leads they provide. Sales and marketing alignment isn’t easy.
The key is early engagement and dialogue, and a collaborative approach to planning - and using - your content. It's also about alignment: agreeing common objectives and KPIs, and ensuring that your campaign meets the needs of both marketing and sales.
Here's a checklist of ways we've found to help streamline the process:
Your sales engagement checklist
Campaign planning
▢ Engage the sales team early and seek their input
▢ Understand customer pain points and use thought leadership to resolve them
▢ Ensure thought leadership is relevant for commercial conversations
▢ Consider how it can strengthen existing relationships and build advocacy
▢ Don’t focus obsessively on lead generation
▢ Agree on KPIs and plan for collecting anecdotal feedback
At launch
▢ Brief broader client-facing teams on key insights and messages and provide training on how to present the insights effectively
▢ Ensure teams have the right tools and formats to take the insight out to clients
▢ Agree marketing/sales interactions with engaged prospects
▢ Seek anecdotal feedback and collect KPI data
▢ Celebrate campaign-related commercial successes