Your marketing team’s job is to generate leads, and your sales team’s job is to turn those leads into registered attendees.
But despite the obvious links, the two teams often undertake their respective tasks in silos. The marketers spread the word about your event without sales input, and the sales team makes cold calls to anyone who might be interested.
Make sure that’s not happening on your team. Why? Because alignment between sales and marketing shortens sales cycles and makes everyone’s job easier. More importantly, it can make a huge impact on your revenue.
With sales inputs, your marketing team is able to target the most important accounts to your business. They’re also given a direct view into revenue generation, so they can make smarter decisions based on ROI. And by coordinating with marketing, your sales team can work with more leads who are already familiar with your event.
Here are five ways to ensure your marketing and sales teams are working together — so you can sell more tickets or registrations, faster.
1. Align goals across teams
Your sales and marketing teams ultimately have the same goal: to generate revenue for your business. But to get to that goal, they’ll need to agree on other objectives. For example: what quota of qualified leads marketing is responsible for producing, how quickly sales needs to act on those leads, and how hard should they pursue them.
This should be a joint discussion between teams, leaving you with clear documentation — and a point person to hold everyone accountable.
But before you can solidify long-term goals, you need to lay out the basics. What does a lead look like? When does a marketing lead become a “qualified lead” for sales? Create clear, documented definitions for these important terms to keep everyone on the same page.
2. Have marketing listen to sale’s front-line experience with customers
Don’t forget that salespeople are marketing, too — through one-on-one conversations with potential attendees. These daily conversations give them tons of knowledge about which words, approaches, and pain points to hit on when working a lead. Make sure your marketing team is using that knowledge to develop messaging that resonates with your audience.
After all, your sales team ultimately has to deliver that message. If your sales team knows that the marketing message isn’t working, they’ll ignore it and go their own way.
3. Give sales insight into your marketing strategy
It’s not just your marketing team’s responsibility to step outside their department. Sales also needs to step up and familiarize themselves with your marketing materials. All those white papers, brochures, ads, and blog posts can be used as sales tools. Not only does this content show off what’s unique about your event, it can efficiently answer your potential attendees’ questions.
Try to keep those marketing materials in a shared folder so sales can read up on the latest content — and suggest new ideas.
4. Set up regular cross-functional meetings
The only way to ensure that sales and marketing stay aligned is to create a feedback loop that includes regular meetings. Report on metrics and say what’s working and what’s not. Each side should ask the other how they can perform their jobs more effectively. Marketing should be open to changing up their campaigns, and sales should be open to changing up how and when they follow up with leads.
Sales may not be using certain content — which could be because it’s not useful, or because they didn’t know it exists or how to use it. Marketing may not be producing useful content — perhaps they’re ignoring sales’ recommendations or aren’t getting useful feedback. This meeting will reveal exactly what’s going on and where the teams can better align.
5. Bring them into the other side
If there are certain pieces of content your potential attendees seem to love, maybe they’d like to talk with the people who created that content: the marketing team. Make someone from the marketing team available to field calls once in awhile.
Similarly, get your salespeople out in front of prospects, promoting them as experts in their field. You could accomplish this by publishing blog posts under their name or having them share and interact with industry leaders on social media.
Not only will this crossover showcase the expertise of your team to potential attendees, it will help your teams see how the other side does its job, making alignment and coordination that much easier.
For more tips on improving your sales, check out “7 Strategies to Sell More With Your Ticketing & Registration Tech.”
