For nearly 5 years, I’ve been working with sales and marketing teams to collaborate on marketing automation programs helping to make their demand gen engines run more effectively.
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I’ve found that working side-by-side with the sales team (as a member of the marketing team) has tremendous benefits. Both teams win when you can collaborate. Here are four key tips for bringing sales and marketing teams together for your marketing automation programs:
Understand each others quantitative goals.
Sitting down and evaluating the goal expectations of sales (revenue, # of closes, etc.) can help the marketing team define their own goals. Working backwards from close rates, lead conversion rates, etc., you can get a good idea of the numbers marketing needs to produce in order for sales to meet their goals. Aligning with sales on this goes a long way to forming a harmonious relationship.
Collaborate on campaign and automation planning.
Whether it is on a whiteboard or in a marketing campaign flowchart, getting input from both sales and marketing personnel will make your campaigns and messaging more effective. Sales can help marketing understand the type of problems people are having, helping to identify content that marketing should create. Further, marketing can show sales how marketing automation can make their lives easier by automating messages that are personalized (for their lead and from the sales rep), along with sending sales alerts when a lead activity of interest occurs.
Have a joint weekly meeting.
Establish some type of report or dashboard around the main marketing and sales goals. Do a 20-30 minute digest of this report to check what’s working, what needs to be changed and how far along each team is in meeting its goals. This helps each team support the other in accomplishing their goals in an ongoing basis. Sales will bring great ideas to the table after interacting directly with leads all week and marketing can let sales know what is happening on the campaign front to give sales the confidence that prospects and leads will continue to flow into the funnel.
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Get everyone trained on the platform.
Marketing automation is not just for the marketing team. Sales teams can get tremendous benefit out of marketing automation, combined with their use of a CRM. Make sure that your sales team gets training on the platform, but not just generalized training. Help create and execute a custom training program that makes it simple for sales to use marketing automation without getting lost in the complexities. The more time you create for the sales team to sell (aided by marketing automation) the better chance your company has of hitting and exceeding its financial goals.
Hopefully you can see that your sales team is clearly a critical component to the success of your marketing automation programs. By having marketing and sales collaborate around your marketing automation, you will drastically improve your chances of a positive ROI on your MA investment, growing your company’s revenue in the process.

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Lucy