Get More from Your Sales Relationship

Do you get anything from partnering with your Go to Market colleagues? Or is it just give, give, give? It’s time to start getting something back – other than the satisfaction of a job well done, of course!

Let’s take a look at each team. We’ll walk through the GTM flywheel, starting with how marketing can get more from sales and then working through success. And then on to the next part of the flywheel… Let’s go.

• ICP and Persona Insight: Who should you market to is the most basic question to ask. Sales and success teams constantly engage in coalition building to close deals. They uncover critical roles that are key decision makers. Armed with that info, marketing can develop content and programs to target the right people to advance deals. 

• Contact Information: Email outreach, targeted ads, and other marketing programs rely on email or physical addresses to target effectively. Well, sales teams generate contact data via email conversations, meeting invites, and more. Capturing that data in your CRM or other data lake helps marketing leverage it for better programs.

• Messaging Resonance: Is your narrative actually effective? Sure, you can test it via A/B tests on ads, website copy, and bulk email. But seeing which messages resonate (and with whom), marketing can adjust how it communicates value. Look for what sales activities “win” so you can replicate them at scale.

• Urgency: A similar issue is the degree to which you can develop urgency. Deals get hung up due to lack of budget or general CYA-ness. But if you can learn from sales what value (Revenue generation? Cost / Risk / Effort reduction?) accelerates deals, then you can again scale programs to address urgency early in the funnel. 

• Usage Data: If you have a PLG or a pilot-led sales motion then there will be a wealth of data generated during the sales process. Information like which functionality do people use, which nurture messages bring people over the line to purchase, and more. 

• Positioning: Beyond messaging is how you position relative to partners, customers, and competitors. No one speaks to as many people as your sales and SDR teams. So, learn from them how other players position and what resonates so you can tune how you position your own offers.

• Experts: Why is sales the only one to get ‘enabled’? Bring in top sellers to do “marketing enablement” to train up your team on the pains and needs that sales has so you can better support them. From content and lead quality to messaging and competitors. 

These are just a few examples of how a marketer can leverage their sales relationship to make marketing more effective. Set up a weekly meeting and a Slack / Teams channel with your sales peers and be open to their feedback. The result is going to be better collaboration, alignment, and goal hitting. 

Thanks to my terrific “smuccess” partners at SetSail: (Colin O’Neill, VP of Sales and Paulette Greene VP of Success).