Dogs and cats, the Red Sox and Yankees, South Shore and North Shore – for any number of reasons, some groups are historically aligned against one another.
You can add marketing and sales to that list. They speak different languages, have different metrics, require different skills and have differing views on Patagonia vests.
It’s unfortunate, because both are ultimately striving for the same goal – more revenue – and the divide between them often stands in the way of achieving that goal. While sales may never understand why marketing dresses like extras in a Pearl Jam video, sales training can improve alignment – and your marketing approach.
That’s right, sales training can help improve your marketing strategy.
Our research and firsthand experience suggest there’s a direct correlation between how good your sales reps are and how reactive your marketing becomes.
See if this sounds familiar:
CEO to the head of sales: “We’re going to miss our monthly sales targets again? Do we have the right leads?”
Head of sales to the CEO: “Yes, we’re going to miss our targets. The leads are not the right quality, and we don’t have enough of them.”
Upon further digging, it’s discovered that there are plenty of leads and the pipeline is full, but the reps aren’t moving them through the sales process effectively. They can’t close these leads, causing the company to miss its goals.
The CEO then heads over to marketing and puts extra pressure on the CMO to generate more and better leads. In response, the CMO stops everything the marketing team has been doing and tries to rejigger the strategy on the fly, throwing new tactics in the mix. She’s willing to try almost anything to generate more leads, hoping that some of those leads turn into opportunities that sales will be able to close.
Does this sound familiar?
There are really two problems here:
1. Rather than responding to the pressure with a thoughtful strategy, marketing overreacts with a veritable brainstorm of tactics to try, or what we refer to as hit-or-miss marketing.
2. As for sales, had the reps been properly trained and working more efficiently and effectively to close the leads they have, they wouldn’t need even more leads to hit quota.
You can’t have six sales reps doing six different things, telling six different stories and asking prospects six different sets of questions and expect to hit your sales goals. You need one documented and visual sales process that everyone follows.
Everyone has to be trained in every aspect of that process, and leadership has to support its importance every day. Without this, you have almost no chance of hitting your sales numbers. Here’s how you get a sales process, get it installed and get everyone trained around it.
You can’t look at sales training as a check-the-box exercise – Yep, we did sales training this year. We’re good to go.
Instead, look at it programmatically. How do we train our sales reps all year long in an ongoing effort as part of a specific program that will help them improve?
This means the training becomes part of what you do every week. It’s part of your new sales culture and designed to teach practical tools, techniques and frameworks that help reps ask better questions, shorten the sales cycle and close more new business. Here’s what you should be looking for in that training.
To keep sales and marketing pulling in the same direction and toward the same goal, make sure there’s complete alignment between the two. This means working with sales to keep them firing on all cylinders while they follow up on the leads that the marketing generates.
It also means having consistent communication with marketing about the true quality of the leads coming in. And, no, “garbage” isn’t usable feedback. Marketing must continually refine and optimize its lead generation approach to produce the best possible leads. That can only be done with insightful feedback.
How many leads were true opportunities?
How many were qualified vs unqualified?
If they weren’t qualified, why?
To achieve this alignment, it might make sense to talk with a firm that has a framework across marketing and sales. A revenue generation system ensures you have the right marketing, the right reps, the right training and the right technology to produce a repeatable, scalable and predictable growth engine for your company.