Marketing and Sales: Two Facets of MSP Marketing
For your MSP marketing strategies to be effective, both marketing and sales departments need to work together. It is common to see these two departments separate, with their own goals and metrics. However, that can lead to internal turmoil for your company. Getting these groups to work together is important in driving revenue and business growth.
How Marketing and Sales Interact
For most companies, marketing teams work to generate leads. Employees in marketing create content that brings prospective clients to the sales team. Once potential customers have been introduced to your company through marketing strategies, your sales team needs to sell to them. Your business doesn’t make any revenue unless your sales team is successful at selling to these leads. Any break in the process causes problems for your bottom line.
Where the Friction Starts
The goals and targets for sales and marketing teams are different. These groups have different purposes and measuring their effectiveness needs different metrics. MSP marketing is judged on the number of leads that they generated. For your marketing team, their concern ends at that point of the sales process. The concern for the quality of leads may not be a concern of theirs, as long as the quotas are met. This break in responsibility causes troubles for the sales department. Poor-quality leads are tough to sell to, and it can negatively impact their revenue numbers. Animosity grows quickly in these scenarios.
Moving Past Hard Feelings
On both sides of the marketing versus sales battle, there is a potential for hard feelings. To effectively run your business, you need to overcome this environment. Blame and anger are not going to help your company improve revenue numbers. Coming from the top, both teams need to see that alignment is critical. This message needs to be a high priority and it needs to be fully enforced. The goal of this message needs to be that marketing and sales are expected to work together to create sales for the company as a whole. Removing the separation helps drive synergy between the groups.
Building the Team
To create the right environment for improving sales revenue, you need to have the sales and marketing team working together. Both groups need to understand the challenges and motivations of the other entity. This effort creates professional apathy, which leads to successful team integrations. Help build this relationship by having meetings and open communication between the departments. Knowledge sharing helps bridge the gap between the sales and marketing teams.
What Makes a Quality Lead
Most friction between marketing and sales comes from a miscommunication on the definition of a quality lead. Both the marketing manager and sales manager need to come up with a list of requirements that a lead must meet. This list removes the ambiguity and ensures that the sales team is working with potential leads that are worthwhile.
When developing this list, look to your target market and find measures to gauge a leads likelihood of purchasing your company’s services. Your ideal customer profile is the standard that all leads should be held to when measuring a leads potential. Included in these metrics are the type of industry, the size of the company, job titles, and interactions with the marketing team. All of these indications help sort the quality of the leads generated from the marketing department.
A successful company requires marketing and sales to work together. By ensuring that your MSP marketing efforts are supporting your sales team, and vice versa, ensuring a group mentality. An environment of animosity between marketing and sales is not just an office reality; it can be overcome by solid leadership and some effort. By building a positive relationship between your sales and marketing groups, your company is better set up for revenue generation and business growth.
