How to Break Down Silos Between Sales and Marketing

Traditionally, sales and marketing departments have lived in separate worlds. At this point, silos simply belong in the past. Not only does it lead to a waste of time and energy, but it wastes financial potential for the business and bottom line. Here are some ways you can break down stubborn silos.

[Spoiler alert. It’s through account-based marketing strategy (ABM)].

ABM Brings Departments Together

At its core, account-based marketing brings teams together to do their part to target the right accounts at the right times. It’s a series of data-driven actions on sales and marketing, making closing deals much more likely.

Rather than working in silos, the two teams begin to synchronize, enabling each other to perform their best with data-driven insights and a focus on key accounts that help the business reach its primary objectives. To make this happen, we need role and responsibility alignment on each team. Here’s how to do it.

Leadership Needs to Set the Tone 

Change starts at the top. If leadership doesn’t encourage team alignment and collaboration, it won’t happen. The leadership team should clarify that success happens together, with open communication and collaboration, eventually leading to organizational alignment. 

This may require creating an ABM leadership team with strong players from each department to create positive change and impact across organizational lines.

When your department leaders can align around common goals, it ensures your marketing and sales teams are working well together. No longer are there marketing campaigns that sales aren’t aware of, and vice versa. Everything coming from your company is aligned.

Create Lines of Communication

Increasing communication is highly effective in breaking down silos between sales and marketing. By doing so, you create a free flow of information and inspire natural collaboration. Over time, the two departments begin to speak the same language, work toward the same goals and have the same definition of success for ABM.

Without open communication, sales won’t know the marketing team's content, and marketing won’t know what content sales prospects and clients are asking for. With equal collaboration, marketing can create customized content for specific accounts based on insight from sales — and sales can make insightful pitches to accounts with the right data from marketing. It’s a reciprocal relationship that is continuously fueled by the ABM model. 

You can accomplish this level of communication with monthly meetings between sales and marketing and stay aligned through valuable feedback from one team to another.

Align on Roles and Goals

So, now you’re communicating, which means you can align on goals, roles, and responsibilities a lot easier. 

• Who is the target audience?
• What are their pain points?
• What numbers do you need to hit? 
• Who is going to do what to accomplish that? 

While you make up one ABM team, you’re still a team of unique but siloed strengths. Determine your roles and responsibilities based on those departmental strengths. Make those roles clear and then align on your goals by sharing:

• Plans and execution ideas
• New tactics
• Metrics
• Targets
• Sales objectives
• Leading and lagging indicators 
• Progress toward the goal

When marketing effectively takes on its role of sales enablement, sales wastes less time on lackluster leads, which produces:

• Greater account success predictability
• Visibility into marketing impact
• Increasingly focused pipeline generation
• Improved efficiency

Use Collaborative Tools

While marketing is sales enablement, these two teams need tools that will promote their collaboration in order to enable sales. You need to share everything we mentioned above (metrics, comments, client status, feedback, etc.). You do that with tools and resources, such as HubSpot, Google Suite (especially Drive), Slack, ClickUp, SalesIntel, Terminus, Sendoso, and more.

• HubSpot = sales enablement. 
• Google Suite/Drive = organization enablement. 
• Slack = communication enablement. 
• ClickUp = project enablement. 
• SalesIntel = research enablement.

Start The Conversation Today

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve likely found yourself frustrated with the other side of the aisle. If you want to break down the silo, start the conversation today. Reach out to your counterparts, speak with your team leader, or start building out a long-term plan to create a better relationship with the other department.

Marketing and sales both want to see the company grow. It’s simply a matter of aligning goals, opening lines of communication, and getting the tools in place that foster collaboration. But none of that can happen until you start making your desire for collaboration known.

Should you need help breaking down the silos and building the bridge between marketing and sales, we are here to help. We can give you the tools to have productive conversations and help you implement the right technology that will foster communication. If marketing and sales misalignment is preventing you from growing, schedule a call today.