Why the link between marketing and sales teams break?
Smarketing, where marketing and sales work as one dream team, sounds so simple yet it ain’t!
Your revenue engine works best when Sales and Marketing are working in lockstep, yet for many organizations, this is just a dream. Their tools, tactics, metrics, and mindsets get in the way of making this fantasy a reality.
This dysfunction exists in both large and small companies.
And a lot of times when you have a sales team and a marketing team, each of those team’s goal is a little bit different, or maybe individual members within those teams have a different goal that is their top goal.
And, this happens, a lot of times, because of the ways that we incentivize teams.
Salespeople are incentivized to makes sales, that’s how they make money, you promote them when they make a lot of sales. In some companies, there are team incentives where if you all hit quota, then everyone gets some sort of incentive as well.
The way the marketing team is incented can be a lot different. They may not have solid targets like sellers and it’s never a make or break situation every quarter.
This typically results in two breeds of people in any company. The marketers and the salespeople. Different thinking, different behaviors and different motions. The little things we do from the incentives to just the way we talk about our teams lead us to have these factions.
Another thing that happens, an easy way to get a little bit more of a team thing going on, is we actually physically sit the salespeople and the marketing people away from each other. I think it’s actually really important to mix people.
We are energy being first and we would love to be part of a team that is excited and energetic. When you actually have people mix, or even better, switch seats, people start to empathize with each other more.
I would strongly recommend that for great teamwork to unfold, everyone needs to feel like they are part of one team.
If we can have one leader drive lead to deal, like a Chief Revenue Officer, who is able to plan KPIs, incentives to build one team that works towards ONE GOAL – you can definitely move towards a Smarketing DNA.
Will you?