How to align sales & marketing

My thoughts on typical S/M issues

Mehdeeka is for solo marketers or small teams working in the B2B, SaaS, startup, and tech spaces. Check out the previous issue on sales enablement. Help me grow Mehdeeka by sharing it with a friend or colleague!

Sales and marketing are such cliches, and in particular this tiktok really sums it up. And here’s a bonus sales/marketing tiktok just because I can.

I’ve definitely had my days of wanting to strangle the sales team, particularly when they request something, I make it for them, they forget they have it and then months later request the same thing. Regardless, sales and marketing need to work togeher. Here’s my top tips for #synergy

1. Where possible, have both sales and marketing report to the same person. This could be a CMO, sales director or CRO (chief rev officer). Basically you need one person who smacks the kids and forces them to hug until they work together.

2. Run scheduled, regular feedback sessions. Preferrably, have sales/marketing take turns at hosting. In small teams, everyone should attend. At Perkbox (my day job), I run a fornightly session with corp and mid market sales separately. We run through this format (in this order);
   a) “I like” - positive feedback, things they want to remain the same
   b) “I’d like XYZ to improve” - negative feedback, things that need to improve
   c) “I’d like” - requests for anything they want, also brainstorming
   d) Go back to “I like” and as a group rate each point raised from 1-10 to measure urgency and importance. This filters out anomalies and unimportant pieces of feedback
   e) Action points, which then get re-discussed and updates given at the beginning of the next session
   Within this, I make sure to ask for detail, pipeline health, where leads are getting stuck in the funnel, emerging trends from talking to leads, etc.

3. Create a playbook of all the tactics you as a marketer can offer the sales team for things like re-heating leads that have gone cold, reaching people in ways other than email, etc. We have so many tricks up our sleeves but sales often don’t know what we’ve got on offer.
   During the feedback sessions mentioned above, I make an effort to offer suggestions of things I can go out of my way to do to help the sales team. These one-on-one offerings go a long way in relationship building and slowly tempts the sales team to proactively come to me for help rather than me pulling their teeth out.

4. Sales managers need to be on board. I’ve never had an easier time working with a sales team member than when their manager told them “Kayla can help you with this” and they came to me with a list of questions. Bless that manager!

Have you got any suggestions for helping sales and marketing teams work together?

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Check these out

A new marketing book called Lemon by Orlando Wood is out. Here’s an interview with the author. I do really agree with him that advertising is an art, but the rise of efficiency and productivity has reduced it to spreadsheets and ROI in such a way that the industry has become extremely bland and ineffective.

Some visual inspiration in an interesting piece that analyses the colours of currencies from around the world.

Giphy released a report on the most viewed gifs of 2020 - lots of fun in here.

Trung Phan deep dived on an “overnight success” comedian and proved she had in fact put in her 10,000 hours of practice to become a master. I really like the focus on how she tested and iterated her creative output to finally figure it all out.

And finally, if there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I love cooking and I despise air fryers. Knowing this, Gina sent me this read on air fryers and how their popularity continues to grow. My two favourite quotes from this piece are “You can make anything in that hoe!!!!!!!!” and “the majority of food items consumers cook in their air fryers are potatoes.”

Honestly, if anyone sends me an email with the subject line “tell me why you hate air fryers”, I’ll give you a half day sermon.

Last link is my dog’s instagram account. He’s really very cute.

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Next week

Is the last week of the newsletter for this year!! So tune in for the last of my trio of thoughts on sales and marketing. See ya later, kids.