Harmonizing your sales & marketing teams for future success

A disconnect between sales and marketing teams can result in costly implications for any company. By sales and marketing not being in open communication with each other, leads can be affected and fall through the cracks, greatly impacting sales and revenue. In many cases, sales will inevitably blame marketing for the lack of leads, just as marketing will blame sales for not closing the leads they had worked hard to generate for them.

Traditionally, the marketing team’s role was to generate leads, while the sales team would in turn take that lead and turn the lead into a customer. Yet, both have the same objective, which is to increase sales! Nowadays though, both teams need to be much more in unison. Hopefully, your company is already doing these 3 things if your sales and marketing teams are working together as a cohesive unit:

1. Sales are providing relevant feedback from the front lines:
   Feedback is everything. What are the challenges keeping this potential customer up at night? What are their goals? If your marketing team knows this vital information, they can change their messaging accordingly, create more relevant content to engage the customer and drive better leads to sales.
2. Having marketing and sales work together on the buying journey, not the sales process
   This is another upside of the feedback process. Has your marketing team sat down with sales to map the buyer’s journey based on the feedback given? Incorporate this feedback to better meet your audience’s needs. Put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer and focus on content development for each phase of the buying process.
3. Integrating your sales CRM with your marketing automation software
   To properly track the process of point 2, integrating your CRM and marketing automation is essential in tracking the entire lifecycle of a potential customer, from website visitor to lead to sale. Sales will be armed with more information to engage the potential customer and marketing will be able to track where the best leads are coming from.

In relation to this and if interested, McKay Allen from Ivantis and Ben Atkinson from Clinical Genomics will be discussing next-generation digital strategies for harmonizing your marketing & sales teams at the forthcoming BioPharma eMarketing Summit EAST in Miami this September. They will be discussing:

• Developing a mutually-beneficial integrated sales and marketing plan based around your most valuable prospects, focusing on the buying journey, not sales process
• Evaluating buyer metrics for prospects at each stage of the sales process
• Assessing how long each stage of the sales process will last
• Understanding the necessity for accurately documenting strategies used to enhance prospects further along the sales cycle
• Systematically measuring progress: Reinforce successful strategies, and eliminate / redesign tactics unsuccessful in advancing the buyer’s journey

If you are a life-sciences professional interested in learning more about this or how to implement new marketing approaches for you and your team, consider joining us in May. If you are interested in viewing the full program, please download our brochure here.

1. Feel free to join our Public Relations & Marketing Professionals LinkedIn Group. Members of this rapidly growing group will benefit by gaining access to an exclusive network of industry and academic professionals within the Healthcare arena. Members specialize in marketing, social media, mobile marketing, new product launches, digital, content creation, branding, sales, PR and more.