Breaking the silos
Since the beginning of my career, I observed silos in many departments within companies. Whether they had 10 or 4.000 employees, these companies always struggled to break down the silos.
According to a few studies, the pandemic improved sharing and collaboration between teams, which reduced the silos. This is good news, but there is still a lot to do.
The silos between sales and marketing are a long-standing issue and this is a fact I’m seeing in different continents and in every kind of business.
I’m a marketing professional who’s always enjoyed having a desk close to the sales department to interact and learn from them. When they were pitching the product to prospects or solving issues with clients, I felt that I was missing a lot in the beginning of the pandemic, especially because I moved to a different industry and started working from home (WFH) starting since day 1.
Alignment with sales and marketing has significant impact on business revenue. The common goal of both teams is to drive sales and revenue. And by uniting them around a single revenue cycle, it will boost marketing ROI and shorten the sales cycle.
To minimize the silos brought with WFH, here are some tips on things to do in collaboration with the Sales team:
Promote calls to align on the goals, agree on lead definition, create target account list, and follow up on the progress of the leads/marketing campaigns
Share the pipeline progress on a weekly or monthly basis
Create fun roleplaying sessions or an internal competition for the best sales pitch
Get involved in sales presentations with customers and prospects. With the increase of meetings via Zoom or Teams, you have the opportunity to join sales calls from different countries to get insight of your audience needs, what they value, what questions they frequently ask, etc.
WFH brought new challenges and opportunities in the collaboration between sales and marketing. The most important thing is to adapt to new circumstances to maintain a smooth communication process.
