Get Buy-In For A Digital Marketing Strategy From Your Sales Director

When you think about it, sales and marketing working closely together seems like the most obvious thing in the world, doesn’t it?

The sales team is tasked with working leads and turning them into sales, but unless they’re going out knocking on doors or cold-calling, they rely on the marketing team to provide those leads — so why aren’t they working together?

The problem might not be that your sales team aren’t bought into your brand new digital marketing strategy, but simply that they don’t care about your marketing strategy full stop - all they care about is making those sales.

To change this you’re going to have to bring the sales team into the process. Here are our top tips for securing sales buy-in for your digital marketing plan.

Improve communication

The number one problem between sales and marketing teams when we speak with different organisations is a lack of communication.

Set up monthly or bi-monthly catch-ups to discuss the quality of leads being driven by marketing. Ask sales to outline the types of leads that are most likely to close.

You should also encourage marketing to sit in on sales calls, again with a view to helping them to better understand the value of different types of lead.

You want to show that sales and marketing are both fighting the same fight. Simply getting both teams in a room together on a regular basis is a big step towards this.

Create a Smarketing SLA

You need to have your sales and marketing teams pulling in the same direction and opening up those communication channels is essential in achieving this, but you also need to ensure accountability.

Create a service level agreement (SLA) between both sales and marketing that is defined and agreed to by both parties. Marketing agrees to deliver a certain value of qualified leads each month, while sales agrees to work a certain value of leads each month.

Why value of leads and not number? Because not all leads are created equally. If marketing is delivering hundreds of new leads per month with a low average value, this isn’t preferable to half that number at a much higher value.

Bear in mind this SLA will be a work in progress, particularly at first , so don’t promote it to the wider organisation until after you’ve had some time test it out.

Integrate software

If your sales and marketing teams are working on disconnected software it will be difficult for them to work towards the same goal.

Data is the glue that will hold your Smarketing (sales and marketing) team together, but if they’re looking at different sources of data, measuring success — and managing the perception of what success means for each part of the team — is going to be very difficult.

Here at SpotDev we’re certified HubSpot partners and many of our clients use the platform for managing both their marketing and sales activity. However, if you use Salesforce for example, HubSpot can provide an integration that enables each platform to communicate with each other.

Even if you’re not making use of a CRM system like HubSpot or Salesforce, you should create a centralised repository for monitoring lead flow.

Get sales involved in marketing process

When creating marketing strategies, your aim is to generate content that will convert website visitors into leads. You’ll have carried out lots of work mapping out your buyer personas and thinking about the kinds of challenges and needs they have.

Except many marketing teams won’t utilise one of their richest sources of information on these personas — the sales team.

Your salespeople are the ones talking to your ideal customers on a daily basis, listening to their problems and identifying areas of educational need. With this in mind, you should be integrating sales into the marketing creation process. Their insights could be invaluable in unlocking the secret to engaging with your target market.

What’s more, when your sales team are invested in the digital marketing strategy they are far more likely to buy into its delivery.

I hope that while reading this blog post you’ve realised the hitherto unrealised truth — that sales and marketing are on the same side! By working together you can not only yield significantly improved results for the organisation, but make everyone’s job a lot easier.