You're caught in the middle of sales and marketing clashes. How do you prioritize campaign success?

No company will succeed in hitting sales objectives without alignment between sales and marketing. I have found that working with a Smarketing approach is the winning formula. This integrates the flow of work between the two teams to achieve common goals and targets. Lead generation is much more effective when the two teams are not working in silo, and they are openly exchanging customer insights and behavior to have better results. The power of both teams working in unison is massive for the business and will create a harmonious synergy in lead generation and customer experience. Leading to reaching more qualified leads, sending consistent messages, increasing the chances for sales to hit home runs.

To prioritize campaign success amid sales and marketing clashes, focus on fostering collaboration and aligning both teams around shared goals. Begin by establishing clear communication channels and joint planning sessions to ensure that both sales and marketing understand each other’s objectives and strategies. Use data-driven insights to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to both teams, such as lead quality and conversion rates. Promote a culture of mutual respect and cooperation, emphasizing the common goal of driving revenue growth. By creating a unified approach, you can harmonize efforts and maximize the impact of your campaigns.

This has always been one of the classic hurdles, what marketing perceives to be a qualified lead, when in reality, it is not what converts with sales when the lead is contacted. Sales interact with leads on an intensive daily basis, marketing must collaborate to understand which customer personas /segments have better conversion rate, which are most likely to buy, this will help in less wasted marketing dollars on bad leads and wrong targeting. Also, minimize wasted efforts in sales outreach to leads that most likely won't convert. The exchange of data is critical for targeting the Right audience, ie. marketing might find certain trends and spikes of interest from different audiences. Sharing this with sales is critical and vice versa.

Sales and marketing should regularly hold brainstorming sessions to discuss campaigns, target audience, how to get better leads, which channels to use, services / products to highlight versus targets, call to action, buyer journey, etc. There are so many details that need to be discussed, planned, and analyzed in depth before launching a campaign. When both teams fill in the blanks, there is a more unified script and strategy to learn from if it didn't go as planned, or celebrate and magnify on if deemed successful.

Nothing is worse than launching a high dollar campaign, when you are targeting the wrong audience or have the wrong call to action. The result is bad leads, or qualified leads that go into a messy funnel, resulting in a low conversion rate. Sales should communicate the qualified lead criteria to marketing. Not everyone who signs up is qualified, this needs to be clearly aligned between teams to avoid the blame game. "We got the leads but sales are not converting" or "Marketing is sending us unqualified leads". Both teams must join forces into really understanding their audience and their leads and think of it as one operation with one goal, versus silo thinking.

I think this point may be one of the most critical/lowest hanging fruits in this article. Oftentimes (especially amongst old-school traditional salespersons) data tracking, lead management processes, and other analytical efforts are hard to get action on and buy-in from the sales team. Why? Because it seems to not directly help them sell and it is annoying and non-habitual. Change is hard. My suggestion: make the lead management and measurement process as simple as possible for the sales team. Use the automation, streamline the amount of clicks it takes to log lead activity, and let go of some of the data points to keep the most impactful. Do your best to fit the marketing measurement efforts to the current sales process.

Sales is such a thing that to understand it, we have to first understand the needs of the other person. Everyone knows what they want but very few people know what the other person does not want. Those who know what the other person does not want, then we will be able to do sales well and there is only one way. Understand the needs of the other person. And only then will we be able to sell any product well. This is my belief.