Santa is currently preparing his army of elves to bring joyous gifts to the children of the world on the 25th. Big job right? But so is organising and rallying your sales and marketing team. However, Santa isn’t going to help you with that.

So, when it comes to your sales and marketing teams you need to get them to working harmony. Here are some tips on how you can create your own little Christmas miracle by improving your sales and marketing relations without having to employ a chubby, white-bearded man around the office (unless you already have one of those).

1) Communication and feedback

The most important thing is to make sure communication is of the utmost importance, as miscommunication can cause a lot of problems and leave your prospects less than impressed. Simple things like duplicating leads can be extremely frustrating for prospects who keep receiving calls and also for the marketing team that has already emailed them!

To make sure this doesn’t happen, look into integrating your marketing platform with your CRM. That way, both sales and marketing have all their data in the same place, so they know what’s going on with each lead.

2) Give the customer what they want!

Making sure that everything is coherent for the customer buyer journey is essential for success. You must align your sales and marketing strategy so that the needs of the customer are always met efficiently. Using lead nurturing to deliver the right content at the right time to each prospect will make sure you’re always pushing the right prospects through the pipeline.

3) Score your leads

The fact of the matter is, not all prospects are going to be convinced after just a few emails. You need a way to keep track of which leads are ready to be passed to sales and which ones need more nurturing. You should take advantage of lead scoring technology to keep your leads in check. This dissolves the old-fashioned and unreliable ways of the past, and make sure your sales and marketing teams can work together more effectively.

4) Create personas

Unifying the tone of voice used throughout the whole pipeline will tie together your whole brand. The best way to do this? Create personas on your top-target prospects! By having both sales and marketing agree on how they want to come across to win these personas over, you can build a well-aligned strategy and a consistent theme throughout your pipeline communications.

5) Separate departments, same vision!

Despite the fact that the two departments have separate roles, they need to drive towards one common goal. Marketing isn’t about trying new things, it’s about delivering results for your sales teams. So use lead generation technology to show you who is coming to your website, what they are looking at and which campaigns they came from. This way, you can focus on creating campaigns that give the sales team the leads they need.

6) Focus on value

The ultimate goal is to sell a product that can benefit the customer and build a lasting relationship. After the sale has closed you still want to encourage them to keep coming back. That’s why it’s so important that your whole process between marketing and sales offers value to the customer and strengthens the brand.

If you need more info on how to get sales and marketing working more efficiently, have a look at our whitepaper.