4 Great Ways to Collaborate with Sales

4 Great Ways to Collaborate with Sales:from Wide Angle by Corey Mull
As part of our 2013 B2B research – which we talked about a little bit here – we’re taking a deep look into lead management. How are marketing organizations doing it now? What model of customer decisions does it rest on? How is it succeeding and how is it failing?
One thing we’ve heard again and again is that the biggest (surface) failing of existing lead development programs is that Sales doesn’t trust the outputs: in other words, Sales doesn’t believe that they produce ready-to-buy prospects. Marketing, however, is sure that they do. And therein lies the impasse: if Sales won’t act on marketing-generated leads, how can Marketing ever be sure if the leads they’ve generated are worth anything?
I mean, this isn’t Sales’ fault, exactly. In most organizations, a significant part (or the entirety) of their salary is commission-based. Why mess with what works, particularly if it means you can’t pay your bills? But it goes deeper than that: if Sales doesn’t trust Marketing-generated leads, there must be a reason beyond simple inertia: Marketing and Sales simply don’t agree on the way the market works for the products and services they sell.
And so the key to Marketing and Sales collaboration is to build a truly-shared vision of the market and how it works. Here are a few ways we’ve seen this work. It’s not that these are easy – far from it – only that they’re likely to surface the fundamental disconnects between the Sales and Marketing organizations.

• Collaborate on a shared vision of the customer. In this post we talked about how Marketing mostly endorses – perhaps without realizing it – an information-based vision of the customer. Most of our lead management systems are based in a simple equation: more information consumed = greater likelihood of buying. It stands to reason that if they’re not taking the leads we generate and nurture seriously, Sales must, at some level, disagree with this assessment. Establishing some common principles about who a customer is and how they operate is a start to bridging this gap.
• Create an inventory of existing customer information. Collectively, commercial organizations know a ton about their customers and how they think and operate – but the information is typically housed in silos. A starting exercise in a more broader collaboration is putting all of this information in one place to the extent possible – and it’s a task that will feed greater collaboration down the road. Learn more about how to do it here.
• Establish an ongoing information sharing system. It’s not enough to simply share information once and be done with it; there must be an ongoing, formalized system for sharing new information. We’ve seen members do this by establishing knowledge management systems like wikis; but it’s also important that information be actionable and valuable. See how others have done it here. 
• Find areas for tighter integration. Our Commercial Integration Diagnostic measures your Sales and Marketing team’s integration across 20 key attributes that drive the success of the broader commercial team. Check out where you need to be on the same page, and launch the diagnostic (it’s free!) to find areas where there’s more work to be done.