Sales and Marketing have been competing against one another since day one. Both teams collide when it comes to budgeting, misaligned expectations, role, and even cultural differences. Despite being on the same team and driving towards a shared goal of growth, they always seem to collide.
A business to achieve an aligned and integrated commercial team takes a disciplined approach from management to create that relationship. This article will run through how anyone can help align both communication and collaboration tool, Workplace By Facebook.
Communication is key
Communication and transparency are essential to rebuilding any kind of working relationship. Both are important given how we are in an age where remote working is now the norm. And with more people away from the office, you can no longer rely on catching someone to run through your workload, and instead, you have to be proactive.
Workplace Chat is a fantastic tool, and it helps to keep conversations moving. It is a standalone instant messaging app installed on any device, from your mobile phone to desktop device. And as soon as your team incorporates it into their regime, you will look at email for internal communications again.
Email for Internal Communications is dying fast.
No one here is slating email, even though it is no longer seen as new technology because it still serves a purpose in many areas. However, in terms of internal communications, Chat is the best and much easier to use.
At Generation Digital, most employees work remotely. Since joining the team, I have been lucky enough to learn all the marketing and communication tools they daily. Interesting tools such as Chat has to the most convenient to date. With it, people feel more connected, and that is most likely down to how incredibly fast the response time of instant messaging compared to email.
Follow the right people.
You can select who you wish to follow on Workplace by adjusting profile settings, leaving you with a personalised newsfeed of relevant information. As a result, each department has better visibility into what everyone's doing.
If you are unsure of a colleague's business role or their responsibilities concerning your request, you can check out their profile to understand their role in the team.
Suppose you are part of a large organisation with a heavily populated hierarchy within each department. In that case, you can search for the organisation’s chart on Workplace, giving you the chance to find where a particular person sits within the company or department.
Encourage Feedback
Encouraging feedback is vital. Suppose a marketing team were to conduct a poll and ask the sales team to identify the top challenges customers face before purchasing your product or service. A sales team would have first-hand experience dealing with those challenges, and that shared intelligence would then help the marketing team plan their content.
And synonymous with marketing, the same goes for sales. Getting feedback on resources such as presentations is also helpful and essential to make sure they comply with corporate branding and messaging.
Create Events
Workplace’s Events tool enables users to create and schedule an upcoming event ( synonymous with Facebook events). Using events is a valuable way to collaborate on trade shows, webinars, industry talks, which are often worked on by marketing and sales teams.
Creating an event not only provides organisational visibility but allows collaboration and discussion from within the event.
Use Workplace Groups
Groups are the engine that drives collaboration in Workplace, and here are a few creative ways to use groups to improve marketing and sales alignment:
- Create a group based on goals. Sales and marketing can discuss and agree on goals within a dedicated group to ensure there is no misalignment when looking at the bigger picture.
- Sales can create a business development bulletin with weekly updates on business won, closed, retained or even lost. A great way to boost engagement and communicate this would be through a live stream video.
- Process is something that helps all businesses run but sometimes employees are unclear with what and how to do things. A good example is dedicating a group to your sales or lead handover processes. This group can help get employees get up to speed by reducing frustration and conflict. It also creates an environment to discuss and improve current processes.
- Build a group that hosts all existing and new marketing content and collateral, creating a centralised place to find customer-facing resources. Every time the marketing team publishes content, whether it's a blog post, content offer, etc., they can post it in the group for everyone to access and share via personal channels. Employees can also use this group for sharing content ideas and requesting marketing materials.
- Systems - I'm not talking about IT support, but rather a group built around a shared system that both teams use, like your CRM. We have an open group for our CRM and marketing automation platform so that everyone using it can report errors, discuss product updates and share ideas.
- Market insights - share market knowledge to improve sales tactics and marketing strategy.
- Relevant industry topics - create temporary groups based on legislation topics that are of interest to both teams.
- Keep an eye on competitors by creating a group with shared intelligence. Information can come from sales or marketing and would be valuable to everyone. Plus, this helps to focus on the real enemy, shifting the energy spent on internal conflict to beating your competition.
- It would be efficient to create a target group on your buyer personas, target audience and lead qualification criteria. Just like the idea around processes, this will keep sales and marketing aligned on WHO you're targeting and creates an open environment to discuss and refine these definitions.
- Projects. Create groups for projects that involve both departments working together collaboratively.
- Social. Keep things social and create a group dedicated to organising online quizzes, team days out or an evening down the pub (when we’re allowed again!).
Overall, Workplace customers drastically improve the relationship between sales and marketing. Moreover, Workplace will improve internal communications and collaboration throughout the whole business.