Integrating Your Sales and Marketing Teams Will Save Your Company Millions of Dollars

I have been writing a lot about optimizing the processes within the sales department and why it’s crucial for growing revenue indicators. As stated by McKinsey, in companies whose business model implies dedicated salespeople, their effectiveness determines up to half of the company's revenue or even more in some cases. But, when improving processes within the department, many forget to pay attention to its integration within the company’s whole system. The marketing department in general has the same goal: increase revenue and show that your product is worth purchasing. However, in many cases, the integration between them is lacking.

Below are three instances where the seamless connection between marketing and sales departments is crucial for the whole business:

Planning the number of leads

Obviously, the main task of the marketing department is to attract leads. And without proper planning, it may seem that the more leads are attracted, the better. However, when marketers attract too many leads – by too many, I mean more than the sales department can handle effectively – they just waste our money. So, the number of leads should be discussed together.

The way to plan it is pretty simple.

1. After some experience with the sales process, we know the capacity of each sales manager. To be more precise, each manager should spend X hours on the line and, on average, can speak with Y clients for the period. Usually, these norms are taken from the best-performing salespeople: if we see that one performs effectively using certain practices, we encourage others to do the same. It’s harder to approximate it from the very beginning when the sales department is not yet entirely built, but generally, you will be able to calculate it after a couple of months of operation.

   
   

2. The number of sales managers on the line is determined according to the desired revenue indicators. For example, our goal is to increase revenue every month to win over our competitors, which we do pretty successfully: during our first year on the market, we managed to earn more than $6M. So, we have a plan on how many times our product should be sold to keep pace and determine the number of salespeople to make the needed number of deals.

   
   

   
   

3. Every evening, our Heads of Sales, each of whom has a team of 6-8 sales specialists, determine how many of their subordinates will be working the next day for each of the two products we suggest. It’s crucial to check it every day: someone might be on a day off or sick leave, and some show worse results in selling one of the products, so they should be excluded from the distribution. Then, the Sales Director calculates how many salespeople in total will be on the line and relays this information to the marketing team lead. The simplest and most effective way to do this is to just use a channel on a corporate messenger!

   
   

Marketers are then able to adjust the daily budget to attract the exact number of leads. And if it appears that the sales force needs more leads or that they’re incapable of handling the plan, all necessary changes are announced on the very same day on the preferred corporate message.

Classifying leads

One of the problems a marketer might face is that they don't know what happens with the lead after they filled in their details and were transferred to one of the sales managers. They could have converted into a purchase, but they could also have been of poor quality and were not going to buy anything at all. Of course, if you sell something that a person can decide about in a day, you don't have a problem there: you almost immediately know what happened with each lead. However, in the case of products with long sales cycles, it's crucial: if you're selling houses or cars, it will take your clients weeks to decide if they are indeed ready. But that doesn't mean that the leads are "bad"; they might convert later. So, to estimate the quality of the attracted leads almost immediately, we implement a leads qualification system.

As soon as a salesperson communicates with a client, they learn and fill out some details about them. More specifically, they pay attention to:

• their intention – whether the customer indeed plans to buy our product

• the attitude to the cost — if the customer can afford it

• ready to buy — whether the customer plans to buy the products/service today

  
  

If the customer has all three of them, they are marked as “hot.” For marketers, this means that they should try to attract more and more people like them. If the leads have two of the needed characteristics, they are “warm,” – and the marketers would suggest creative materials to warm them up. And if the customer has only one of them, they are “cold,” and you should not waste your budget attracting the wrong people.

In the screenshot below, you can see the parameters with which the sales specialist classifies the clients.

Communicating regularly

Sales specialists are gatekeepers of clients' true fears and desires. They are the rare part of the system who have the opportunity to talk directly with people who are willing to purchase the product but have yet to decide. During communication with the salesperson, a potential client describes in detail why they are willing to purchase the product and what questions or fears they have.

For example, in our case, they often ask something like:

"Is it true that I can find a job after my education?" or "Will I be able to study it if I have no technical background?"

This information is a treasure for the marketing department. Apart from saving costs directly by appealing to the needs and fears of the clients better, which increases the conversion of creative materials, it helps the sales specialist save time because clients already know the most interesting things for them.

To share insights, we have weekly cross-team meetings for the marketing, sales, and product teams. During these meetings, we analyze the metrics, the quality of leads, and the efficiency of sales, and articulate everything that might be interesting and useful for the other departments’ representatives. Salespeople who have been talking with clients throughout the whole week share if they notice some patterns that can be used to improve creative materials and the product itself.

For example, they learned that among our Filipino clients, there is a high proportion of people working in call centers who are willing to change their jobs. Those people are afraid to start something new and are unsure that they can acquire the needed skills. So, we decided to create materials targeted at people with this fear and get great results. The advertisement below is not used anymore, but when it was, the CPL was $0.76, which was just amazing.

Sometimes, it’s necessary to share it right "at the moment." For example, if a sales specialist notices that several clients misunderstand the promo or that the leads of a certain day are of poor quality, they immediately report it to the marketing team. As mentioned previously, Slack and other corporate messaging platforms are just perfect for keeping in tune even if the team is working remotely like we are.

To conclude

As evident as it is, I'm sure that structured communication between all teams should be encouraged, which is especially important for the ones that are as tightly interconnected as the sales and marketing departments are. A company’s revenue, to a large extent, depends on the efficiency of the sales force, which can only show significant results with high-quality leads in the needed amount. So, integrating these teams will decrease your costs dramatically.

Best of luck with your sales!

Also published here.