Building Stronger Relationships With Sales

How close should the sales and marketing teams work together?

Jason Widup, VP of Marketing at Metadata, asks a panel of sales and marketing experts to share their take on the partnership potential between sales and marketing teams.

📣 Panelists include:

• Amy Slater, Global VP Sales, Palo Alto Networks
• Olivier L’Abbé, President, Metadata.io
• Sydney Sloan, CMO, Salesloft

Tune in to learn why communication, shared goals, mutual education between sales and marketing teams are vital to company growth.

⚡️ Top takeaways:

Takeaway 1: Sharing goals is the way forward

When we cut that distance between sales and marketing, most companies find they have pretty similar goals. We all want the same thing, so it makes sense to align together and share those goals.

Both sales and marketing teams have so much to offer and can help each other solve problems in unique ways. A problem that marketing has been scratching their heads over could be solved in a quick chat with a sales rep. When sales and marketing work together, it means more productivity, problems are solved faster, and new ideas are shared.

As Sydney explains, when you have shared goals, you have two people solving one problem versus two problems in two teams.

Takeaway 2: Metrics are key to progression

Sales and marketing may have slightly different metrics, but once those two teams are brought into alignment, then what? How do you determine that the alignment is working well?

Olivier thinks there needs to be alignment at the top on which metrics sales and marketing teams share. Marketing may be measured by clicks, impressions, and leads, whereas sales may have slightly different ones. But at the end of the day, both sales and marketing are trying to grow revenue. So that should be the overall focus to ensure that all metrics measured have that top goal in mind.

Takeaway 3: One way sales can help marketing

How exactly can sales help the marketing team? Marketing may be pushing out content blindly, but to really target those customer pain points and create content that resonates, they should ask the sales team. Salespeople talk to customers all day long and have valuable knowledge on what customers need, want, and expect.

Sydney believes that simply opening up this conversation and getting sales involved in the content creation process can help the marketing team become more effective in its content.

She goes one step further and suggests that marketing watches whatever customer calls come through and use that as primary research. You can listen to the good calls and the bad calls and grab great ideas for content that will speak to your customers.

🎁 BONUS!

Learn how to avoid building a rift between sales and marketing and encourage a productive partnership instead.