The Three Phases of Overcoming Sales & Marketing Beefs
In 2016, Shahid joined the Hughes Network Systems, which is a broadband network provider, team on the enterprise marketing side. When he arrived at the first meeting ahead of a massive annual tradeshow event, he found tension and chaos between the marketing and sales leaders. And he vowed to change it. “We had 23 different sales decks,” he shared. “Now we have two. We also had 500 dashboards in Salesforce—we deleted nearly all of them.” To make change, Shahid leveraged a three-part framework:Phase 1: Listening & Information Gathering
According to Shahid, the first phase is all about listening. “I met with everyone—the head of east coast sales, the head of west coast sales, the head of marketing, executive leadership,” he shared. “I wanted perspectives. I wanted to know what everyone was thinking and how they saw their roles.” During those meetings he had some core questions that he asked every stakeholder:- What were your objectives, roles, and responsibilities in the last year?
- What are some of your top highlights from the past year?
- What are some of the misses you experienced this past year?
- What are your goals for this year?
- What do you need from marketing to reach your goals?
Phase 2: Finding the Sweet Spot
Once you’ve collected all the data, it’s time to analyze and normalize that data so you can create a plan that management and leadership will buy into. “This is where you look for common goals between leadership, sales, and marketing,” Shahid said. “It’s all about finding that sweet spot—and making sure everyone is in agreement on where things fall. You cannot do it on your own because sales and marketing leaders have to be able to sell your end-plan to their managers and teams.” Once the common goals are agreed upon, you can create a plan that helps you hit that sweet spot and sell it to the C-suite. And there are four key steps that Shahid outlined:- Define and agree on objectives and roles. Who’s doing what and how does that support the overall business goals?
- Identify short- and long-term goals. If you only think long-term, you’ll never get anything accomplished because everyone is so busy. You need a short-term plan to get traction.
- Outline the tactics and strategies you’re going to use to reach those goals. And marketers, be honest about what you can and cannot do. Some things you may not be capable of doing yet, and that’s OK. Your sales team just needs to know.
- Document plans and actions. These are the marching order for each team.
Phase 3: Empowering Execution
Now it’s time to profess your love to sales by making it easy for them to become that hero for the customer. For Shahid’s team, that meant making it easy for the sales teams to access and internalize marketing materials and messaging. Here’s just a sampling of what that looked like:- Leveraging Dropbox, Shahid’s team created and shared templates, style guides, brand guides, and more with the sales team.
- The team used Salesforce Chatter, a communications tool, to collaborate and share information.
- They created social messaging and visual assets that sales reps and sales leaders could leverage on their personal social media platforms.
Love Has Its Benefits
The collaborative approach to fostering sales and marketing love didn’t just lead to alignment and trust for Hughes Network Systems. It led to big, beautiful business results. In the last year, the sales and marketing teams have seen:- 120% boost in web engagements
- 118& increase in email engagements
- 108% rise in tradeshow engagements
- 62% lift in social engagements
- 22% jump in win rates
The post Sales & Marketing Alignment: Shahid Javed Shares How to Go from Hate to Love in 60 Days appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.
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