In a successful company, the components function together seamlessly as a coherent whole. Segmentation and defining specific tasks for each department are important but so are integration and collaboration. Ensuring your sales and marketing operation departments are on the same page is essential for success at generating sales.
Traits of an Effective Sales Department
A sales team’s job is to sell a product to customers and meet targets for the number of sales, subscriptions, and services. The sales team generates strategies to reach growth goals. This is where collaboration is essential. A sales team needs to have clear communications with marketing and operations to establish meaningful goals and tactics to reach them.
Traits of an Effective Marketing Operations Department
Identifying the duties of a marketing operations department can be a challenge, because their tasks may vary according to what is needed and the tools at their disposal. Generally speaking, a marketing operations department oversees the technical processes that enable the marketing team to function efficiently.
For instance, if marketing emails are not being sent on time because of outdated technology, the Marketing Operations Manager will find the best tools to automate the tasks and ensure that the entire marketing team is on board. The marketing department can then devise strategies to attract leads that it can send to the Sales Department so they can turn these leads into sales.
Integrating the Sales and the Marketing Operation Teams
Marketing and sales are two phases of the same process. The marketing team, with the help of technical solutions from the Marketing Operations Department, devises tactics to attract leads. This can include a social media strategy to garner likes and shares or attracting subscribers to company emails. The sales team’s goal is to convert these leads into customers.
Integration between the marketing and sales teams is essential to success. According to a State of Inbound report in 2018, companies that had a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between the sales and marketing teams had triple the success rate compared to those without SLAs.
Creating an SLA
SLAs improve efficiency and communication between the sales and marketing team. An SLA is an agreement about deliverables that go between each party. When these teams work together, they can agree on a definition of crucial terms, refine goals, and create reasonable timelines. There is also agreement on procedures for lead management and the best metrics for sales growth.
Collaborating Through Technology
Technological solutions provide a way for teams to collaborate because they provide mutual visibility into which tasks need to be done, which are completed, and a forum for discussing projects mid-process. Cloud technology allows teams to work together in real-time and provide feedback while preventing duplication of tasks.
Working Together
According to the firm Dun & Bradstreet, an ideal scenario for a company is not knowing where the marketing department ends and the sales department begins. Collaboration between these two departments provides a sense of shared goals. Drawing up an SLA and upgrading technology to foster collaboration can help create a unified strategy that will increase sales.
