Just like a married couple, marketing and sales can be the best of friends…or the worst of enemies.

If you’re dealing with bickering, petty name-calling, lack of cooperation, or whatever else both sides can come up with, here’s some ideas for making them strong allies:

1. Make Marketing and Sales Responsible for the Same KPIs

In many companies, you have MQLs and SQLs. When you ask marketing, they say yes, they’re doing their job. Ask sales, and they say they can’t do anything with those lousy-quality leads.

So instead, tie marketing and sales’ KPIs together. Both are responsible for leads generated and closed. Tie their bonuses and compensation to their performance too. With their destinies now intertwined, marketing and sales will need ways to work together.

2. Have Both Marketing and Sales…Actually Work Together

Do your marketing and sales departments actually have different physical locations in your building? Are they at different offices altogether?

Consider locating them in the same place physically, side-by-side. Psychologically, if you set them apart from one another, you feed the “us versus them” mentality that keeps both separate.

It’s easier to create a sense of “team” when you place both together physically. It may seem like a bit of a risk at first. But it makes good business sense.

3. Marketing and Sales Need to Actually Do Their Work Together

When sales has its own departmental meetings, marketing should sit in. And vice-versa. Marketing and sales work differently. While marketing looks at the mid and long-term, sales needs to close in the short-term. Sales wants to push. Marketing needs to pull.

Sales performance is easy to measure. Marketing is not. Both will work together better when they understand what the other deals with on a daily basis.

Marketing should sit in on sales calls with customers to learn what the market actually thinks. And they should share information in their databases too.

4. Managers Should Meet Together in Person

A 2011 report by Aberdeen Research found that the sales and marketing managers at higher-performing firms met together 69% more frequently (1.89 meetings per week) versus lower-performing firms (1.12 meetings per week).

So yeah, this whole “meeting in person” thing makes a lot of sense. Because…think about it. Manager will have a better sense of what’s going on with the other department. They’ll know what they need. They can ask questions so they understand what they need to do to help that department out.

Getting Sales and Marketing to Work Together Isn’t As Hard As It Seems

If you have a relationship between sales and marketing that’s filled with strife, there’s no need to despair. You can fix it. And following these tips will get you to a better place. One where sales and marketing work together to drive more profit to your company.

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