A feedback loop between sales and marketing helps integrate learning into the creation of effective content and campaigns for every organization. There are several ways this feedback can be exchanged. Periodic coordination meetings are often established to ensure that the departments are talking. It is easy for these meetings to become ineffective gripe sessions. Every marketer has heard things like:
1. "These leads are junk."
2. "Why can't we just run a Super Bowl ad instead of these stupid campaigns?"
3. We need marketing to "Do Me a ...." to solve the gripe of the week.
The meeting results in both teams feeling frustrated.
Marketing feels like they have turned into fire-fighters who must jump from project to project. Allowing your marketing team to become a reactive group of fire-fighters is not going to help sales in the long term.
The bottom line is that large group meetings will not suffice if you want to build a productive partnership between marketing and sales.
I have a few ideas on how to turn these gripe sessions into productive learning exchanges:
1. Sales and marketing leaders should formalize the agenda ahead of time to ensure each group is prepared to respond.
2. Marketing needs to listen at a more personal level. I suggest you establish specific goals for your marketing team members to have a one-on-one meeting with members of your sales team every week. (yes every week). This "meeting" does not need to be a formal affair with conference rooms or presentations. There should, however, be an agenda - to collect learning about leads, campaigns, and competitive actions.
3. The agenda needs to include high level summaries of:
The results - Each team leaves the meeting knowing that their feedback has been heard and prioritized.
1. "These leads are junk."
2. "Why can't we just run a Super Bowl ad instead of these stupid campaigns?"
3. We need marketing to "Do Me a ...." to solve the gripe of the week.
The meeting results in both teams feeling frustrated.
Marketing feels like they have turned into fire-fighters who must jump from project to project. Allowing your marketing team to become a reactive group of fire-fighters is not going to help sales in the long term.
The bottom line is that large group meetings will not suffice if you want to build a productive partnership between marketing and sales.
I have a few ideas on how to turn these gripe sessions into productive learning exchanges:
1. Sales and marketing leaders should formalize the agenda ahead of time to ensure each group is prepared to respond.
2. Marketing needs to listen at a more personal level. I suggest you establish specific goals for your marketing team members to have a one-on-one meeting with members of your sales team every week. (yes every week). This "meeting" does not need to be a formal affair with conference rooms or presentations. There should, however, be an agenda - to collect learning about leads, campaigns, and competitive actions.
3. The agenda needs to include high level summaries of:
- Quantitative results of recent activities
- Plans and priorities
- Summary of the qualitative learning collected in the informal meetings
The results - Each team leaves the meeting knowing that their feedback has been heard and prioritized.
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