- By: Mark Jakobsen
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Why Your Sales Team Can’t Win Alone: The Case for Cross-Departmental Alignment
You’ve hired the best. You’ve trained them like Navy Seals. You’ve invested in the best tech for them. So why aren’t they getting the results they should be?
Here’s the truth, and it’ll be a painful truth to those fragile sales egos out there, sales success relies heavily on how they interact with your marketing, customer services, product, and even procurement teams. If you haven’t set up inter-department communication lines then you’ve got a problem.
The star player problem
Let’s look at it from another point of view, imagine you’re a manager of a football team. You’ve built a solid defence, a creative midfield and a deadly striker partnership. But if you haven’t got a game plan then all you’ve got is 11 players on the field playing their own game.
And that’s what happens when your sales, marketing, customer service, and product management work in silos. Each could be the Michael Laudrup at what they do, but without alignment you are simply throwing money and opportunity away.
When sales, marketing, product and procurement combine
We know what each group is good at:
Sales
knows what customers are asking for.
Marketing
understands how to position and communicate value.
Customer Services Team
has the feedback from customers.
Procurement
ensures the business can source and deliver what’s promised.
Product
builds the solution that solves real problems.
Each team comes onto the field of play with a key piece of information. In isolation, you can’t really do much with it, but when you’re able to combine all four streams, that’s when the magic happens because sharing insights:
Helps to shape strategy together = which helps each team to support each other = which gives you transformative results.
Or in other words, campaigns become more targeted. Messaging becomes sharper. Products evolve in response to real customer needs.
The cost of misalignment
Let’s look at it from the opposite viewpoint. Without alignment:
Sales pitches miss the mark, unable to convince why you have the best solution
Marketing runs campaigns that fall flat and fails to connect with your potential customers
Product develops features that go go unused or are misunderstood
Procurement may source the wrong materials, overpay for resources, or face delays due to unclear requirements
It’s not just inefficient, it’s expensive and damaging to your company’s growth.
Getting your team to play as one
All the great teams in history, Arsenal’s Invincibles, Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona, or the 1992 Danish football team all have a common thread. They all played as a team. So, if you feel your company isn’t performing as well as it should, one step you can take is to examine your internal communication lines. And this applies to companies of all sizes.
If you embed collaboration into your company’s culture your teams will be in sync so your product team is building the offering based on customer feedback, from which your marketing team can create killer content and ads, allowing your star sales team to pounce and convert the leads with a Michael Laudrup proficiency.
Should you find yourself struggling to get the right set up, we work with leadership teams to break down the silos and build the communication lines needed. We’ll help you to get your teams in sync so your sales can thrive.
Want to know more, read our product marketing whitepaper.
Download our product marketing whitepaper
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