Your marketing team’s job is to generate leads, and your sales team’s job is to turn those leads into registered attendees or sponsors.
But despite the obvious links, the two teams could — and often do — undertake their respective tasks in silos. The marketers spread the word about your event without working closely with the sales team, and the sales team make cold calls to anyone they think might be interested.
Make sure that’s not happening on your team. Why? Because alignment between sales and marketing shortens sales cycles and makes everyone’s job easier, while increasing revenue.
Your marketing team is able to target the most important accounts for your business, and your sales team are given leads that have already been exposed to your core messaging. Sales and marketing alignment also gives the marketing team a direct view into revenue generation, showing just how much or little ROI your organisation is getting from their marketing dollars.
Here are five ways to ensure your marketing and sales teams are working closer together — helping you sell more tickets, faster:
- Align goals across teams
Sales and marketing ultimately have the same goal: create revenue. But to get to that goal, they’ll need to agree on other objectives, like what quota of qualified leads marketing is responsible for producing, how quickly sales need to act on those leads, and how hard they should pursue them.
This should be a joint discussion between sales and marketing, leaving you with clear documentation of your shared goals — and a point person to hold both teams accountable.
Just as both teams ultimately want to sell registrations, they’ll need to first agree on the steps in the sales cycle in order to achieve that. What does a lead look like? When does a marketing lead become a “qualified”lead for sales? What steps should sales take before closing?
These steps and definitions need to be agreed upon ahead of time. For instance, perhaps you decide that qualified leads need to have more than just contact info, making sales’ job easier by giving them your targets demographic information, pain points, industry, and role.
- Have marketing listen to sale’s front-line experience with customers
Don’t forget that salespeople are marketing, too — one on one, directly to potential attendees.
Through those daily conversations, they are gathering tons of knowledge about what works, approaches, and pain points to focus on when working a lead. Make sure your marketing team is using that knowledge, thinking about how their products are helping answer potential attendees’ questions, and aren’t just making up messaging they think should work.
Marketing is about creating a message for your audience — but your sales team ultimately has to deliver that message. If sales know the marketing message isn’t working, they’ll ignore it and go their own way. To get on the same page, you could try create a pilot program, with a joint sales/marketing task force reaching out to a small number of potential leads to test different messaging.
- Make sure sales knows what marketing is up to
It’s not just your marketing team’s responsibility to step outside their department. Sales also need to step up and familiarise themselves with what is available from the marketing team.
All those white papers, brochures, ads, and blog posts can be used as tools for salespeople as they showcase what your event is all about and answer potential attendees’ questions.
Try to keep those marketing materials in a shared folder so sales can read up on the latest marketing materials — and suggest new ideas.
- Set up regular cross-functional meetings
The only way to ensure that sales and marketing remain aligned is to create a feedback loop that includes regular meetings. Report back on shared metrics (those goals you agreed on at the start) and say what’s working and what’s not.
Both sides should ask the other for ideas on how they can perform their jobs more effectively. Marketing should be open to changing up their campaigns, and sales should be open to changing up how and when they follow up with leads.
Sales may not be using certain content — which could be because it’s not useful, or because they didn’t know it exists or how to use it. Marketing may not be producing useful content — perhaps they’re ignoring sales’ recommendations or not getting useful feedback.
This meeting will reveal exactly what’s going on and where the teams can better align.
- Bring them into the other side
If there are certain pieces of really popular content that are drawing potential attendees in, maybe they’d like to talk with the folks who know that content best: the marketing team. Make someone from the marketing team available to field calls once in awhile.
Similarly, get your salespeople out in front of prospects, promoting them as experts in their field. You could accomplish this by publishing blog posts under their name or having them share and interact with industry leaders on social media.
Not only will this crossover showcase the expertise of your team to potential attendees, it will help your teams see how the other side does its job, making alignment and coordination that much easier.
For more tips on improving your sales, check out 10 Ways to Double Your Ticket Sales in 2017.
