In an ideal world, your marketing and sales teams are just two sides of the same coin, functioning in synchronized unity and reaping the benefits of perfected teamwork. But more often than not, the reality is that the two are barely on speaking terms and blaming each other when goals aren’t reached. Whether you have felt the impact yet or not, there is likely a gap between your marketing and sales teams, and your business is suffering for it.
The Breakdown of Marketing and Sales
Your marketing team excels at gathering leads, and your sales team lives for the close. But in between lies the task of prospecting, and this is where things get messy. Marketing understands target personas, lead generation funnels and parts of the customer journey, but some teams fail to translate successful marketing metrics into successful selling metrics. Sales teams, on the other hand, hate prospecting and want to focus on closing, hitting goals and making money.
Tension stirs between the two teams as marketing believes their work is being marginalized as no one follows up on leads. Sales feels that the leads marketing generates aren’t qualified leads to begin with and a waste of time. Frustration grows, time and resources are wasted, and motivation plummets.