It’s become a bit of a trope:
Marketing generates leads, and sales ignores them.
Sales thinks marketing just doesn’t get it and is obsessed with lead volume, sending prospects that never have a chance of converting.
Marketing thinks sales is lazy and doesn’t appreciate the work marketing puts in, since they never touch their MQLs.
But cliches are cliches for a reason, and the divide is still present in many companies, even those with a collaborative culture.
So, how can we get our revenue teams to work better together?
In this guide, we’ll explore the concept of cross-functional collaboration. We’ll explain what it is and why it needs to be a focus point for today’s B2B companies.
Then, we’ll dive into exactly how to foster better collaboration between revenue functions.
Cross-functional collaboration is really just a fancy term for people from different teams working together.
Instead of having marketing, sales, and customer success being siloed teams, the idea is to get them working together on shared common goals. Usually, the most important company goal to collaborate on is revenue growth.
It’s important to note that we aren’t talking about cross-functional teams here. These are teams with special skill sets that work across multiple departments, such as reps who also create content marketing.
We’re simply talking about collaboration across different operational departments.
In practice, this looks like:
Cross-functional collaboration is important in all kinds of companies, but it’s especially critical in modern B2B businesses.
Here’s why.
The typical enterprise buyer journey can last several months and involve multiple decision-makers on the customer end.
Unlike single-buyer B2C situations, where marketers generate leads that salespeople convert into paying customers, B2B revenue generation requires close attention to each prospect’s pain points and desires. It requires successful collaboration across teams, especially sales and marketing.
For example:
One buying committee member might be at the bottom of the sales funnel and ready to buy, with sales running personalised demos and discussing pricing.
But another stakeholder still has objections to resolve and doesn’t understand the product’s value yet.
What would be a good example of cross-functional team collaboration here?
Well, marketing can provide sales enablement content that resolves the prospect’s objections, helping sales get nearer to closing the deal.
When sales and marketing are on the same page, both of them can do a better job of generating revenue.
Marketing needs to talk to sales and customer success to understand which potential customers convert better and which deliver the best LTV. With these customer insights, it can focus its campaigns on those leads that match the company’s ICP.
Similarly, if sales can access marketing’s ad, website, and content engagement data on a per-person basis, they can better tailor their outreach emails and cold calls to each prospect’s intent.
Many B2B organisations focus on acquisition as the sole revenue driver, forgetting about retention and expansion.
It’s much easier and more cost-effective to retain and renew an existing customer than to close a new one, but keeping a customer onboard doesn’t happen automatically.
To set customer success managers up for success, they need to understand key details about the customer’s buying journey, such as their ideal use case or any objections that were resolved during the sales process.
They also need marketing’s support to create content that supports expansion campaigns, and from product to help increase feature adoption.
All of this requires effective collaboration between functions.
Many B2B businesses are active in rapidly evolving markets.
This is especially true in software verticals today, where technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning have the potential to be very disruptive.
These brands may need to pivot quickly, which may involve large-scale messaging, positioning, and targeting changes.
For these changes to happen smoothly and rapidly, revenue teams need to be closely aligned.
For example:
Product marketing must work with sales to adapt how they position certain features or product capabilities. Otherwise, sales will push a message that is no longer relevant or, worse, no longer true.
Let’s not forget about what cross-team collaboration means for the employees in our organisations.
Fostering a culture of collaboration gives employees a better understanding of how each person’s role functions and the impact of their work on the wider organisational goals - both of which are important for fulfilment and well-being.
It’s also a great way to create more interpersonal connections between team members, helping employees feel more connected to their peers. That’s another important factor for employee satisfaction.
Follow these six steps, as shared by Cognism’s CMO, Alice de Courcy:
The first change you can make to encourage cross-functional departments might seem simplistic, but it’s actually critical to creating a meaningful culture change:
Stop referring to marketing and sales separately! Instead, start calling yourself a revenue team.
After all, both teams are responsible for just that: driving revenue.
Sure, you’re still going to have marketers responsible for marketing tasks and sales reps responsible for sales tasks.
But referring internally to marketers and salespeople as being part of a single team reinforces that mindset of collaboration.
Marketing’s job is no longer to “market the brand.” It’s to help the other members of the revenue team (salespeople) do what they do better - sell!
This one should go hand in hand with the previous step.
When combining marketing and sales under a single revenue umbrella, you want everyone working towards the same goal.
At Cognism, marketing’s success is measured by the same metrics as the outbound team.
This solves the whole MQL issue, where marketing is focused on optimising for lead generation without consideration for whether those leads actually convert.
Our marketing team optimises for revenue-generating activities (such as accelerating pipeline and supporting with sales enablement content). Consequently, sales has more respect for marketing’s role in driving growth.
If there’s no cross-functionality at your organisation’s highest level, you’ll struggle to filter this down to individual contributors.
Your C-suite and senior leaders must drive the previous two strategies (renaming sales and marketing to revenue and having them chase down one metric). The company’s ICs must see that executives and team leaders are championing this new commitment to cross-functional projects.
From there, execs need to actually get together and collaborate, not just blow the collaboration horn.
For example, our CMO Alice meets with the other members of the C-suite:
The bottom line is:
Effective cross-functional collaboration starts at the top.
One of the best ways to encourage more cross-functional collaboration is to help employees better understand what their colleagues do and what difference they make.
For example:
Once a quarter, the Cognism marketing team does some cold calling alongside sales.
Alice wrote about this in one of her diary entries, “Put yourself in their shoes”:
“We could, fortunately, still get some really valuable data from this exercise. Once we were able to get people talking.”
“Less about selling Cognism, but more about what our prospects cared about. What problems were they facing? What content did they find interesting?”
“We used this information to lead the way when creating website copy, building our messaging and positioning and ultimately putting together the content plan that allowed us to scale.”
For Alice, there were two benefits to getting her marketers to be cold callers for a day:
Getting sales to collaborate on content pieces like webinars and blogs is an ideal way to drive more cohesiveness between teams. It also has a positive impact on marketing’s ability to grow revenue.
Take Cognism. We’re a B2B data provider, used by marketing, sales, and RevOps teams. We publish content on a variety of topics that touch both departments.
Who better to write a guide on how to be successful at sales than an SDR who literally spends all day selling?
Some other examples of how sales can collaborate with marketing include:
As Alice wrote in her CMO diary:
“We’re very lucky that our sales reps are actually our ICP, so we’re keen to get them involved in a lot of the content we produce.”
“Because of this, they’re much closer to the process, they can see the output and the time it takes to execute. As a result, they also tend to have a much higher interest to see how it performs.”
“They see themselves in videos promoted on LinkedIn and the response they get from viewers who want to connect with them after.”
“This is a really powerful way to align these two organisations.”
Enabling seamless communication is one of the easiest ways to create more collaborative teams.
Here, you’ll want to:
At Cognism, we encourage simple feedback loops where team members celebrate each others’ success.
Here’s an example of this Alice’s CMO Diary - it’s feedback from sales that shows how good Alice’s team is at generating qualified leads:
Want to read more of Alice’s insights? Click here to open the Diary of a First-Time CMO!
Getting sales and marketing to work together might feel easier said than done, and there’s some truth in that.
The journey towards better revenue team alignment and collaboration won’t be without its challenges. Here are three of the most common challenges you’ll encounter, plus some tips on how to solve them.
Sales, marketing, and CS teams often use different metrics to measure victories, which can cause misalignment.
For example:
Sales might be concerned with closing deals and hitting quota, regardless of ICP fit.
Meanwhile, CS is more interested in retention and total customer lifetime value than the total number of customers using the product.
Solutions here include:
A lack of trust can be a big barrier to your collaboration efforts. This is especially true between marketing and sales teams.
Some best practices here include:
Disconnected tech stacks (such as when sales lives in Salesforce but marketing works in HubSpot) lead to inaccurate data, poor communication, and lost opportunities.
To solve this problem of siloed communication, you might want to:
There are many tactical approaches we can take to improve revenue team collaboration, from weekly meetings to tech stack integrations.
But what makes the biggest difference is when a company’s leaders embrace the concept of building cross-functional teams.
Throughout this blog, our CMO Alice shared her tips for successful cross-functional collaboration.
For more phenomenal insights into growing a business, be sure to check out her Diary of a First-Time CMO 👇