Difference Between Sales and Marketing

Coordination

Improving coordination between departments can enhance your output without a substantial investment. Collaboration improves customer support and sales. Many organizations achieve this by:

• 
  Scheduling interdepartmental meetings at least once a quarter
  
• 
  Determining which projects require interdepartmental attention well in advance
  
• 
  Standardizing methods of sharing customer feedback
  
• 
  Conducting high-level department reporting on KPIs
  
• 
  Sharing impactful team changes or internal issues with dedicated management team members as soon as possible
  

Clarity

Transparent practices are key for smarketing efforts. Sales and marketing teams need a clear, shared vision. In this case, clarity between teams ensures:

• 
  A shared understanding of the sales and marketing landscape and customers
  
• 
  The ability to communicate a product’s value to customers
  

And instead of ignoring external or internal red flags, management teams should confront them head-on with a solution-oriented mindset. Important information, including “bad news,” should be shared as needed and addressed to support overall improvement.

Core team

While everyone should collaborate, a core team should maintain communications and manage shared resources. This core team should consist of employees with varying levels of seniority. Sales reps and marketers can make up the majority of your team, but a few managers and department directors will go the extra mile.
Not only does creating a core team simplify information reception, but it also makes it easier for you to relay information to your teams. For example, a weekly meeting with 200 people is much harder to organize than one with 20.

How to align sales and marketing

Now that you’ve wrapped your head around the core philosophy of sales and marketing alignment, let’s put it into practice. Because marketing and sales share multiple elements, it’s easy to assume that alignment happens naturally—but this isn’t always the case.
To help you along, here are a few strategies to align your sales and marketing teams.