What Is The Secret Ingredient for Marketing & Sales Integration?

In almost twenty years of working in both marketing and sales roles, I’m consistently perplexed by the cross-departmental relationships between marketing and sales teams. Recently, I’ve been working with a number of companies to learn more about the key factors involved in integrating marketing and sales and producing increased sales revenue and ROI.

It has become clear to me and the secret lies in training both your marketing and sales teams to truly listen to your customers. This allows you to better understand your customer, their needs and the solutions and/or experiences they are looking for. Armed with this valuable information you are able to develop a marketing and sales strategy that will target your ideal profitable customers using their own language.

I recently interviewed Purolator Canada to better understand the success they have realized with the implementation of their “Sales Effectiveness” team. I asked Shakeel Bharmal – the Director of Sales Effectiveness if the two year process of implementing this new team was worth it? “Absolutely, integrating Purolator’s marketing and sales by creating the Sales Effectiveness team has produced record breaking results in 2005 and 2006 for revenue, profitability and customer retention, making 2006 the best year in Purolator’s history.”

Purolator’s revolutionary approach was based on employing a more strategic methodology when considering their customer’s needs. During dozens of one-on-one interviews with Purolator’s clients, Bharmal discovered they possessed needs that went far beyond the delivery of packages. “The key to connecting with customers, concluded Bharmal, was for Purolator’s salespeople to figure out how they could help clients be successful in their business and then communicate that to them.”Integrating your marketing and sales and transitioning your teams from the traditional ‘transaction based’ selling into ‘value based’ selling, produces tangible benefits for your customers and increased sales revenue for your company… and that’s sales effectiveness at its best!

For more information, on Purolator’s success story read “Delivering Sales Effectiveness” in the April issue of Contact Magazine or visit our website at http://www.teneoresults.com/