As someone that worked in sales and customer service before I ventured into the field of marketing, I’ve seen the difference between sales and marketing teams working together and… the opposite. Generally speaking, when you’re part of an organization, the collective goal that every team member shares is increasing revenue for the business. More revenue leads to innovation, expansion, and more if planning is done correctly.
For sales folks, they are all about the numbers. All of their targets are rooted in quantities. Everything from the number of calls, number of emails, and meetings booked are tied back to a larger team goal of signing on new customers/clients, and hopefully fostering a long term relationship with them that leads to upsells and cross-sells.
For marketers, they focus on ensuring that brand voice and tone, messaging, and resources are consistent and provide value. Everything that’s external-facing, they are likely behind it. They also help out with resources internally to support the go-to-market teams. The relationship between sales and marketing should start with leadership in each of those areas, but if they don’t make it a priority, it can fall on the individual contributors.
When I was in my first tech marketing position as the organization that I started doing sales at, those who I left behind in the sales org would often come to me in hopes of getting new materials written, video content made, or anything else they thought could be helpful in their sales process. I learned that the relationship between sales and marketing at that company was not the strongest while on the sales team, and while I was happy to have the chance to broker that relationship, I knew that it was much bigger than me.
The point is this: Marketing and Sales leadership needs to forge an alliance. If they normalize the relationship between the two departments, the chances of success and strengthening the relationship over time and throughout their respective departments are higher. Marketing helps sales to disseminate the messaging and positioning of the organization, and Sales helps to solidify the value of the marketing team in the form of revenue generation.
Now that I’ve covered the importance of a relationship between marketing and sales more generally, I want to talk about why after leadership, the content team should be seeking to having the strongest relationship with the sales team. During my time as a salesperson, I was trained to learn about a prospective customer’s pain points. By giving them the floor to express themselves following my elevator pitch about the solution we were offering, I was able to surmise whether or not the conversation could continue. The more calls and emails you have, the more patterns emerge in those conversations. The trends in those pain points can make for great content.
If you’re a content writer at your organization and you want to know what sorts of things your audience will find valuable, talk to the sales team. If possible, build relationships with folks at all tenures and types of roles. Ask them to invite you to calls to listen in, and set one-on-one meetings to really pick their brain about how they use the current messaging and the sorts of concerns that folks are bringing up during their outreach calls and emails. This will not only give you insight into whether or not the current messaging and positioning makes sense, but it will also help you generate ideas for content and answer questions proactively for folks who may just be in their ‘awareness’ stage of buying.
You might be reading this and thinking, “Okay… but what does the sales team get out of this?” There are a few things that come to mind:
- The most fine-tuned and relevant messaging possible
- New content to share to folks who are in their awareness stage (i.e. just learning about your brand and offering)
- New/better relationships with marketing that can lead to the creation of other types of content (e.g. email templates, one-pagers, white papers, etc.)
In this relationship, both sides have a responsibility to one another and reciprocity is inherent. If you feel like the relationship between sales and marketing could be better at your current organization, don’t hesitate to get the conversation going. Talk to your leaders and fellow teammates about what makes sense as a path forward.
Khadijah Plummer Consulting 