How Marketing and Sales Work Together Increase Your Brand’s ROI

I’ve seen it before–a company’s sales department blaming the marketing department for ineffective marketing and the marketing department blaming sales for not properly incubating leads and getting potential customers to convert.

As a company leader it can be maddening to have these two departments constantly blaming one another rather than working together.

You and I both know that when sales and marketing work together it results in better outcomes for your brand. Think of these two functions like gears in the mechanism that is your business. When they aren’t in alignment, things can become a slow grind. But when they do mesh, sales and marketing can crank out more sales than either can do on their own.

The Past and the Future

In the past, getting customers to buy products or services was pretty straightforward. The digital world has really changed, and along with it, so has the buyer’s journey. Today, marketing has an increased role in prospect engagement.

And while it’s clear that a lot has changed, what isn’t clear is exactly what marketers are responsible for. This blurring of the lines leaves us with questions such as, “who is responsible for attracting eyeballs” or “who is responsible for revenue coming in?”

When these two departments aren’t coordinating their efforts, lead generation and sales can really run off the rails, so to speak. Sales feels the volume of the qualified leads isn’t enough to meet their goals while marketing sees sales as unfocused free agents doing things their own way with no clear process or strategy.

It’s easy to see how this push and pull can spin out of control.

Bringing Order to the Chaos

Speaking of spinning out, Chief Outsider’s Growth Gears® model aims to fix the imbalance and bring order to chaos of sales and marketing.

Most models and businesses have one gear for marketing, that spins out advertising, sales collateral, events, and SEO while the sales gear only tries to gain traction from every lead that comes along. When done like this, you end up spending more to get more. At some point, you’ll have diminishing returns.

Who wants that? I can safely say, not you.

But by adding gears, you can get sales and marketing to work together so you can work smarter, not harder to get more leads and sales!

The Growth Gears® and How They Improve Marketing and Sales

The first gear in this model is Insight. Think of it as the foundation to your entire marketing and sales strategy. If you don’t have a clear understanding of yourself, your customers, your market and your competitors, you end up working hard while not getting the results you want.

That knowledge is what helps you turn the second gear, Strategy. You can’t formulate a clear and effective strategy with insight that helps you offer the right products and services to the right customers at the right price. And you definitely can’t grow your brand if you aren’t able to position all of those things in a way that your customer can understand and find value in.

Once your strategy gear is turning, it moves the Execution gear. With the benefits of insight and a well-formulated strategy, both sales and marketing can now hone in on the appropriate marketing and communication tactics that generate, incubate and cultivate well-qualified leads.

Final Thoughts

This multi-gear model to sales and marketing does require constant focus and good communication. Sales should take what they are learning from customers back to marketing, so marketing can refine campaigns with even more insight.

All of this takes precision or you could risk things getting out of alignment. But with a fractional marketing expert by your side, I can help you navigate this delicate balance of sales and marketing. When your gears are working in harmony across disciplines, you’ll soon be seeing higher revenue driven by clear insights, strategies and execution.