We see it far too often… Even though sales and marketing have the same fundamental goal of generating new revenue, teams are frequently disconnected and working in silos.
This article forms a blueprint for effective collaboration between sales and marketing directors and their teams and is a collaborative effort between Alec de la Durantaye (Product Marketing Manager at Zymewire) and Maurice Van Rotterdam (Founder and Business Development Director at Sciental).
By combining insights from both business development and digital marketing perspectives, you'll leave with a well-rounded approach to Sales & Marketing alignment that will provide you with smarter, actionable strategies for driving growth in the biopharma industry.
Understanding Each Other's Roles and Challenges
To foster a more integrated and effective collaboration between sales and marketing, both teams must start by understanding each other's roles and challenges.
From the sales perspective, Sales professionals are often on the front lines, directly interacting with prospects and navigating various objections, which requires quick thinking and adaptability. On the other hand, marketing is a data-driven discipline that focuses on engaging various segments, crafting tailored messages, and managing complex projects that drive brand awareness and lead generation.
Facilitating mutual understanding through regular meetings, cross-departmental training sessions and open lines of communication can help break down silos and encourage teamwork. For instance, marketing can provide sales with detailed insights into customer segments, while sales can share real-time feedback from the field, highlighting what resonates most with prospects and existing clients.
As your organization grows, collaboration becomes far more challenging, and expensive. Commercial leaders must lay the foundation early, ensuring the relationship can grow without bottlenecks or points of contention as you scale.
Action Item: Schedule a recurring meeting for Sales & Marketing teams to share new developments, observations, and challenges. Avoid replacing revenue-generating activities with meetings by appointing liaisons on either side to relay learnings.
Creating Thought Leadership by Value-Driven Outreach
Creating dedicated content marketing plans is crucial for maintaining hyper-relevance with your target audience, and this requires a personalized approach rather than a one-size-fits-all strategy.
You can significantly enhance engagement and build trust by tailoring messages to your customer segments' specific needs and interests. For instance, when crafting content such as blogs, white papers, webinars, and case studies, it’s essential to mention recent news or developments relevant to the prospect’s company and highlight industry-specific insights that can benefit them. This not only ensures that your content resonates with your audience but also positions your company as a valuable resource, generating demand for more information.
In the life sciences industry, for example, a firm might publish a series of blog posts on advancements in gene therapy to target research scientists interested in the latest innovations. At the same time, they could create white papers addressing regulatory challenges for compliance officers. By aligning your content with the distinct needs of different segments, you ensure your marketing efforts are impactful and relevant.
Moreover, to build thought leadership, your marketing efforts should focus on delivering high-quality insights and expertise consistently. Instead of employing a "spray and pray" approach, where messages are sent out en masse with little targeting, Sales & Marketing should align on messaging and determine which pieces of content are best suited for which segments. You can take it one step further and categorize content based on where it fits within the buyer’s journey.
For high-value accounts, Sales & Marketing teams can collaborate on Account Based Marketing campaigns. Teams can collaborate on content tailored to the specific needs and challenges of the account, and then create a multi-threading cadence.
Example: Sales performs 1:1 outreach to decision-makers at the organization to build trust while marketing runs a larger campaign across influencing stakeholders to drive awareness.
Personalized outreach, where each message offers tangible value to the recipient, is far more likely to build credibility and trust. While marketers need to target multiple prospects at a time, they can empower sales reps by educating them on the latest content and its uses to ensure that 1:1 cold outreach is effective.
Action Item: Pick a segment within your industry and assemble a personalized piece of content, work together to create messaging to go along with it.
Effective Multi-Channel Communication
In the sales cycle, multiple touchpoints are essential for maintaining engagement and nurturing relationships. These touchpoints should extend beyond direct sales interactions to include a variety of outreach channels and valuable content, all focusing on generating demand.
Content is king, which is why it's essential to utilize a mix of channels such as email, LinkedIn, and phone calls to allow you to reach prospects in different ways, ensuring that your message is seen, heard, and not considered spam. Combining insights from these channels helps create a cohesive outreach strategy that is consistent across all platforms.
On LinkedIn, for example, engaging with prospects, sharing relevant content, and building relationships before initiating a sales pitch can significantly enhance your connection with them. Additionally, LinkedIn serves as a valuable tool to invite your target audience to e.g. educational webinars providing in-depth knowledge and continuing to claim thought leadership in your market. On the other hand, regular newsletters with industry updates keep your brand top of mind without being intrusive. Engaging in social media discussions and creating online communities further fosters a sense of connection and loyalty among your prospects.
By ensuring that your touchpoints are diverse, consistent, and valuable, you build trust with your audience and guide them closer to making a decision.
Action Item: Create cadences that promote messaging prospects across multiple channels.
Establishing Clear Lead Definitions
Clear definitions for leads as they progress through the sales funnel are crucial for reducing ambiguity and ensuring a smooth handoff from Marketing to Sales. Without these definitions, Marketing may forward leads that are too early in the buyer’s journey, leaving Sales to spend valuable time on prospects that aren’t ready, which detracts from focusing on more qualified opportunities. On the other hand, a lack of clarity can cause Sales to overlook leads that have been nurtured by Marketing and are ready for engagement, increasing the risk of missed opportunities.
Additionally, teams should strongly consider creating a lead scoring system. This will ensure alignment on the maturity of a lead from both sides, while also providing clear direction on where Sales & Marketing should be focusing efforts.
By establishing clear lead definitions and integrating them into the CRM system, both teams can work in harmony, reducing friction and ensuring leads move efficiently through the sales journey without slipping through the cracks. Marketing teams can leverage CRM automation features to update lead status fields when certain engagement criteria are met, negating the need for manual admin work. Since sales teams are directly involved with prospects and clients, they must manually update fields based on how deals progress.
Action Item: Review lead definitions & leading scoring. Consider any challenges they may create for accurately logging information.
Collaborative Segment Development and Targeting
Developing and aligning on comprehensive customer segments is a foundational step in setting up your marketing strategy. Segmenting is necessary if you want to ensure your messaging resonates with the unique challenges of each market segment, enabling them to understand how your solution fits their needs.
To create accurate and effective segments, it's crucial to conduct joint research, surveys, and interviews that involve both marketing and sales teams, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of your audience.
Regularly updating these segments based on feedback, new insights, and industry developments keeps them relevant. With well-defined segments, your marketing team can focus on acquiring high-quality data that aligns with these profiles, intentionally directing efforts towards well-defined target groups.
Action Item: Create a channel for sharing insights & observations that may impact messaging across different segments.
Collaborative Content Creation and Lead Nurturing
Sales teams have a front-row seat to what is truly relevant in the market for different segments, making their insights invaluable for crafting effective marketing content. Leveraging this knowledge allows marketing to create content that resonates more deeply with the target audience. By involving sales team members in content brainstorming sessions, marketing can tap into real-life examples and case studies that bring a relatable and authentic perspective to their messaging.
For instance, when sales teams share the challenges and objections frequently mentioned by prospects, marketing can respond by developing content that speaks directly to these challenges. This collaboration ensures that the content not only attracts prospects but also supports the sales process by providing valuable resources that help overcome barriers to purchase.
We recommend that sales teams leverage existing client relationships they've forged to drive more intimate feedback: What helped during the decision-making process? Did anything hinder the process?
These inputs (which would be difficult for marketing to acquire on their own) are valuable and can be rapidly implemented into content creation and campaigns from the marketing side.
Furthermore, nurturing leads should be a joint effort between sales and marketing. Developing comprehensive lead nurturing strategies involving both teams ensures the prospect's seamless journey. With sales insights guiding personalized content creation, marketing can implement automated nurturing campaigns that keep leads engaged over time, gradually moving them closer to a purchase decision. This tag-team approach will help prevent marketing from forwarding cold leads, while also avoiding premature sales pitches from reps.
Action Items: On occasion, marketing stakeholders attend pipeline reviews to stay up-to-date with recent challenges and gain context for creating content to address those challenges.
Goal Alignment and Collaborative Metrics
Strengthening collaboration between sales and marketing requires establishing shared goals and consistent communication. One effective way to achieve this is by setting up a weekly meeting where both teams can discuss the progress, review metrics, and address any challenges in real time. During these meetings, aligning marketing success metrics with sales outcomes is essential.
Marketing may think they’re performing well if the inbound lead volume is high, but if those leads aren't converting to opportunities, and subsequently, closed deals, then quality may be lacking. To effectively assess performance, Sales and Marketing teams must analyze their KPIs together, rather than in isolation. Splitting the sales funnel and exclusively analyzing each stage separately can lead to disconnected insights, resulting in misdiagnoses and misguided adjustments. By examining the entire funnel as a unified process, inefficiencies can be properly identified and addressed, ensuring both departments are aligned and working towards the same goals.
Since sales cycles in our industry typically are between 6 months and multiple years we advise utilizing specific CRM/Marketing tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, or ZOHO to track progress over a longer period. These tools also provide opportunities for clear lead management processes, including rules for lead source attribution.
Action Item: Wisely invest in tools that solve marketing and sales problems, further enabling team alignment and collaboration.
