How to bridge the gap between B2B marketing and sales

The sales and marketing departments are generally grouped together, but often, in the real world, they couldn’t be further apart.

Only 8% of B2B companies say that they have been able to align their sales and marketing teams.

And it’s a common reality for many, leading to friction, missed opportunities, and unfulfilled potential.

What many seem to overlook is that fact that when those teams are aligned, businesses can achieve so much more, faster, and more efficiently.

But how do you align the teams?

Here are our top tips for bridging the gap between B2B sales and marketing teams.

#1 – communicate openly

It’s easy to forget that other teams don’t always know what you’re doing.

Teams are often working with little time to spare meaning wins, losses, and updates can happen in silos. Leads can easily get lost in the funnel and opportunities are missed.

It’s critical to actively share your plans, progress, and news on a regular basis so that both teams know when you are winning and losing.

And this communication shouldn’t just be reserved for senior leadership teams. It’s important for there to be open lines of communication between every layer of the business so that everyone is working together toward the common business goals.

It’s also important to note that different teams often communicate differently. The sales team may prefer to communicate in a completely different way to the marketing team, so you need to figure out how it works best for everyone and keep the communication consistent.

A good way to ensure that you’re communicating and sharing information is to deploy – and utilise – a CRM system. Having an aligned CRM in place will enable the open sharing of information and banish those grey areas!

For example, a CRM can provide the sales team with all the information they need on a lead, not just a name and contact. This will help them to know which action to take next. The information included in a CRM can include basic details but also:

Where leads originated from

When they first interacted with the brand

Any notable interactions/downloads/enquiries

#2 – establish needs

Similarly to both teams communicating differently, both teams will have different priorities, needs and focuses.

Sales teams often prefer to focus on hard data, form fills, downloads, enquiries, and hot leads (ready to convert). If you can establish a qualifying checklist for leads before you hand them over or build all of this into a CRM as we mentioned in the previous point, it will make their job easier and more likely to help marketing in return!

Establishing and understanding these will help to build a more seamless working relationship between the two teams – even asking for the other teams’ opinion and needs can be the first step to building a better relationship.

This also ensures that your communication is meaningful rather than a tick box exercise on your end.

It’s often best to start with a meeting between the two teams where you establish your individual goals and how you can help each other get there.

For example, the marketing team may be focusing on casting the net wide and communicating to a wide range of industries, while the sales team are focused on three high potential clients within one industry. Or the marketing team may dedicate time to producing marketing collateral for the sales team that looks great but doesn’t align with the sales team’s specific plans and goals. This disconnect could hold both teams back.

#3 – build a process

It’s much easier to stay consistent and maintain your communication when there is a process in place.

Whether your process is a digital framework or new regular meetings, it will help to bridge the gap between the two teams and help you work more seamlessly together.

In building the process, you will also be able define:

What KPIs are useful for each team

The goals, plan, and focus of the teams

How you will assist each other

This process can become a failsafe so that no matter how busy both teams get, there is still the baseline communication and cooperation between them.

It can also help both teams work better.

Imagine how much more insight into marketing effectiveness you could gain if marketing were able to accurately track what has happened with leads after they were passed over to the sales team.

This process can also include automations to make life easier for both teams.

For example, you could set up a process in your shared CRM that produces weekly or monthly reports on leads handed over to sales and where they are at now – this is also incredibly useful for proving ROI, we touch on this again later!

#4 – educate and report

It’s no good being great at communicating if you don’t understand the importance of the roles other teams play.

To truly bridge the gap between marketing and sales teams you need to ensure that you don’t just communicate, you also educate.

Sales and marketing have a lot to learn from each other.

Make sure that both teams actually understand each other’s KPIs, goals, and challenges.

The basis of many misunderstandings or friction points is a lack of clarity on what another team is doing and also why it’s important.

Understanding can build a working relationship rooted in respect – and we all need a bit of that!

Some key misunderstandings between sales and marketing are:

The importance of brand building

Key terms such as: CTR, CLV, and SEO

The fundamentals of lead scoring and what makes a sales or marketing qualified lead

A final thought: #5 – acknowledge your differences

Sales and marketing teams are different.

And they’re supposed to be.

While bridging the gap between the two teams is incredibly useful, it is also important to acknowledge that marketing and sales will always be different with often opposing priorities.

The aim of bridging the gap between sales and marketing is to create a mutual understanding between the teams and make life a little easier for both.

When we’re all acting as one team and working towards the same goal, progress and success are much more within reach.

So, our top tips for bridging the gap between sales and marketing are: