Want to integrate the sales team into the organisation? There are three key areas that can affect alignment, that if addressed, can reduce conflict, boost productivity and successfully drive your business forward.
Fix misalignment in communication and understanding
If you can align all departments' understanding of each other and the business as a whole then you’re already on your way to solving many misalignments. Take for example this scenario: sales have the leads from marketing but not the assets to convert. They create their own assets, but without an understanding of the customer journey and what marketing is trying to deliver, chances are the assets will be misaligned with marketing’s original messaging and in turn, less likely to convert.
By having open communication between all departments this can be easily solved.
Fix misalignment in department practices
There’s nothing quite like that pressure to get a last-minute conversion to hit your sales target at the end of the month. Naturally sales want to meet their goals and a financial incentive such as a discount can sweeten the deal for their leads.
Marketers on the other hand want to hold the line on prices so that revenue is predictable month on month. This is where encouraging sales and marketing to have complementing KPIs and to collaborate to create a robust sales funnel that makes sense can reduce friction at the end of the month.
Fix misalignment in office structure
Working from home has a number of benefits (goodbye queuing in the morning traffic) but what is lost is those natural interactions you have with your colleagues around the coffee machine. And whilst there are tools such as Microsoft Teams that can overcome this to a certain extent, it’s not the same as being sat next to a colleague from another department where you can easily ask a question or bounce ideas off each other.
Formal feedback in structured meetings is important, but the informal feedback loop is just as imperative. When you are all in the office the environment and space should be designed around collaboration, where all departments are encouraged to interact and aren’t separated over different levels or rooms.
Now watch this...
It’s time for a deeper dive into the good stuff. We’ve spoken to some of the BlueOcean team from four different departments to find out their perspective, which you can watch below.
By now you’ve probably come to realise we’re big on learning from other departments outside our own. So if you work in marketing and only have a couple of minutes spare, check out the sales perspective and vice versa. Better yet, grab a coffee and watch them all.
