Cross-Functional Collaboration: How Marketing and Sales Can Unite to Drive Growth in a Downturn
Authors
Chris Salazar
Innovative marketing executive with a 18+ year proven track record of driving market expansion, increasing revenue, and elevating market awareness for Fortune 500 companies.
In this article
Introduction
In a downturn, revenue pressure is relentless, and cross-functional collaboration is critical. When sales and marketing operate in silos, deals slow down, budgets are wasted, and competitors gain ground.
Companies that achieve sales and marketing alignment grow faster and more efficiently – even in tough times.
Sales and marketing people are fundamentally different. Or so it seems. Each group has its perspectives, motivations, and compensation. Even their language is different.
That often drives the groups apart, especially in a downturn when pressure to perform is at its highest. Left unchecked, it’s the first stage of failure for many businesses.
But by bridging these differences, sales and marketing can work together to build customer loyalty and revenue – especially during downturns when competitors are struggling, and efficient performance is vital.
So why is it so hard to get cross-functional collaboration? And how do we get these highly motivated professionals to work together for mutual benefit?
Root Cause: Ineffective Communication
Language always reflects reality. Sales and marketing see the world differently and speak about it differently. Sales emphasizes pipeline coverage and close rates while marketing focuses on building the brand and accelerating lead velocity. Sales looks for leads qualified by budget authority and decision-making power while marketing may qualify leads by degrees of engagement.
These are the ingredients of operational friction and missed opportunities in the market. Both are critical in a difficult economy. There is a cultural divide between strategic and transactional mindsets. With the sales team’s quota-driven approach, marketing’s long-term brand-building can be out of step.
This is precisely how a Fortune 250 company lost millions of dollars. The Harvard Business Review reports that in addressing a struggling product line, the unnamed company priced aggressively to grow market share while sales compensation was based on profit margins. As a result, sales shifted their attention to other product lines that offered better rewards.
These mismatches hurt quarterly revenue and erode trust between sales and marketing, leading to ongoing, culture-bound ineffectiveness.
Language is also a barrier to customers, of course. Real opportunities are wasted when marketing campaigns and sales meetings present different terminology and mixed messages to customers. Does marketing’s idea of customer pain points fit with how sales respond in real time to customer objections? If they do, and sales and marketing are aligned, then some studies show a 38% boost in sales.
Inefficient lead handoffs are another symptom of misalignment between marketing and sales. How often do we see CRM data conflicts that stem from marketing’s “sales-ready” lead definitions differing from sales criteria? If sales feel that they must cherry-pick the “qualified” leads, then legitimate prospects are left behind for competitors to sell to, something they are especially happy to do in a recession.
Common Challenges in Cross-Functional Team Collaboration
How does this happen? Salespeople are skilled professionals who know the dangers of misaligned efforts. Marketing people are just as skilled and capable, also striving for coordinated efforts. The root of it all is systemic challenges that tend to thwart all efforts.
Challenge 1: Goals and Incentives
Marketing often focuses on cost per lead, lead volume, and brand awareness while sales tends to prioritize conversion rates and closing high-margin deals. At the same time, the two groups have an understandably parochial view of budget allocations. Marketing wants more marketing programs and sales wants to recruit more salespeople. Debates rage over which group should have pricing authority.
Challenge 2: Siloed Data and Technology
With data so crucial for today’s sales and marketing efforts, managing the data itself can be a problem. Disjointed systems, fragmented CRMs, and misaligned automation tools affect data quality for a whopping 46% of marketers.
Challenge 3: Poor Communication and Collaboration
Incomplete communication between sales and marketing can be the top problem for as many as 68% of sales and marketing leaders. Too often, marketing has difficulty aligning its content to the buyer’s journey with the optimal mix of thought leadership and technical content. Sales often fails to reveal ongoing customer priorities. Fundamentally, sales’ transactional focus clashes with marketing’s creative and strategic mindset.
Challenge 4: Content Utilization Gaps
The dirty secret that many marketing leaders know is that most marketing content is unused by sales. Sometimes that’s because it’s not relevant, or because it’s hard to find. Nevertheless, utilization tends to follow the 80/20 rule, with only a fraction of expensive-to-produce content put to work.
Actionable Tips to Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams
These challenges aren’t new. However, companies that tackle them strategically see measurable improvements in efficiency, sales performance, and customer retention. Effective sales and marketing collaboration is certainly possible and necessary in a tough economy.
Here’s how to get alignment right.
Alignment 1: Deep Buyer Understanding
Let’s share definitions of the ideal customer with quantitative data and qualitative insights. Then segment and prioritize them by industry – or any other relevant aspect – to find the buyers least affected by the economic climate. Fama Technologies, a B2B online candidate screening, did this and saw a 400% increase in their pipeline.
Alignment 2: Targeting High-Probability Accounts
Let’s employ account-based marketing (ABM), a well-established discipline that applies shared data to find vulnerable accounts and deploy tailored marketing and sales campaigns. To fuel this engine, address recurring prospect questions and objections by developing case studies, FAQs, and objection-handling guides.
Alignment 3: Regular Feedback
Let’s talk to each other. Weekly syncs among sales and marketing teams help to align campaign results, lead quality, and prospect pain points. Always-current, dynamic sales, and marketing processes see 10% more salespeople meeting their quotas. Savvy marketers will take these shared insights to sharpen their content plans.
Alignment 4: Shared Metrics and Accountability
Let’s measure what matters. Unify KPIs by tracking MQL-to-SQL conversion rates, sales cycle lengths, and customer acquisition costs. Mutual metrics help teams retain customers and improve prospect win rates.
Alignment 5: Problem-Solving with Content
Let’s get ahead of the customer. With coordinated efforts, marketing can reach prospects efficiently and help warm up the cold calls that sales will make. Reduce buyer concerns before sales calls by using sales and marketing feedback to refine messages in collateral, social media, websites, and any other content produced for the top of the funnel.
It’s Time to Work Together
Creating demand and closing sales during an economic downturn requires cross-functional collaboration and efficient execution. It’s the only way to push forward. But collaboration isn’t about eliminating differences. It’s about aligning them.
These collaboration issues are well-known and have clear solutions. What’s needed is the motivation and authority to fix the systemic problems of mismatched priorities and incentives as well as the everyday disconnects that hamper effectiveness and results.
Marketing leaders must take the lead in fixing these alignment gaps. Start by implementing shared KPIs, regular sales-marketing syncs, and a structured approach to content and ABM. The teams that get this right will not just survive the downturn – they’ll emerge stronger than ever.
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