Sales and marketing share the same goal: getting more clients for the company.
Marketing should be the quarterback throwing the ball (the client) to the wide receiver (the sales team), who runs it up the field for a touchdown, at which point everyone gets to do their touchdown victory dance.
So why does it feel like sales and marketing are playing on opposing teams?
It’s because of a lack of communication and a disconnect between the expectations of one department and the reality of another.
This disconnect goes both ways. Marketing doesn’t fully grasp what Sales has to deal with every day, and Sales doesn’t understand what Marketing is trying to accomplish.
How to Fix It
Any therapist will tell you that relationships thrive when there is healthy communication going both ways. As soon as the flow of communication stops, the relationship shrivels up like a plant without water.
This 5-hour workshop will turn on the faucet of communication so your marketing team can start setting up your sales team for success.
Here’s what that looks like:
Who’s Involved?
Leadership, Sales, and Marketing are all integral to the success of the company, which means all three departments need to be aligned if the company is going to work like the well-oiled machine you need it to be.
What to Expect
We’re going to start by identifying lines and methods of communication.
- Who’s communicating with whom?
- Is the communication one way or is it flowing both ways?
- What tools are used for communication?
- Are both tools used equally by all parties involved?
- When and how often does communication happen?
Next we’re going to open up the lines of communication right then and there: each department will get a chance to talk about their perceptions and expectations of each of the other departments. This will reveal where the gaps are between expectation and performance, which will enable us to get to the root of what’s causing that gap.
Then we can start filling in those gaps, which is where all three departments get to collaborate together to set each other up for success.
Finally, we outline and document a strategy for communication moving forward to ensure success for you and your teams.
Why Alison?
Alison started her career in Sales when she was in college calling alumni for donations and quickly became the top performer.
After graduation, she leveraged her degrees in English and Psychology to a career in marketing, where she has thrived for more than a decade. In that role, she saw how much more effective her content was when her clients were able to leverage that content into sales. One client was able to leverage 6 months’ worth of blog posts into $75,000 worth of business!
On the other hand, there were the clients who let their content wither and die on their website rather than sharing it with prospects, clients, or power partners.
The difference between these two types of professionals became clear when Alison was onboarding new clients and asking them what their client journey looks like. Alison was shocked to realize how many people don’t know where their leads are coming from.
It soon became clear that the salespeople were expected to understand the buyer journey, leaving marketing in the dark.
At the same time, not only is content ideation and creation generally seen as only the responsibility of the Marketing department, so is content distribution. Sales often doesn’t even know what content is being created, much less how to use it in the sales process.
While there’s value in having marketers do what they do best and salespeople do what they do best, the fact is their worlds are too codependent on each other to be ignored.
While no one expects a marketer to be a sales leader or a sales leader to be a marketing strategist, both professionals do need to have a basic understanding of what the other is doing and why.
Alison saw the gap between the sales world and the marketing world and set out to bridge that gap so the two departments could work together in perfect harmony.
And so the Bridging the Gap Workshop was born!
Sound like something you could use?