5 Proactive Conversations to Have Between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support

The biggest goals of any marketing, sales, and customer support team are simple. Gain customers. Make customers happy. Keep customers.

To achieve these goals, each customer-facing department plays a role. Marketing plays an innovative role—producing campaigns to keep current customers and generating new leads. Sales teams work hard to close new deals. Customer support teams work to keep current customers satisfied.

While each department is one piece of the puzzle, we see companies keeping each team in its own silo too often. Yet, there is actually a lot of crossover between departments. All have touch points with customers. And if those conversations are not being carried throughout the teams, you are missing out on an opportunity.

Here are five proactive conversations to have between the marketing, sales, and customer support departments:

1. Ideal Customers

Every prospect is not a good fit for your company. Successfully finding your ideal customer takes input from all three departments.

The marketing team drafts buyer personas, which they use to target the ideal customers with marketing campaigns. The sales team speaks to prospects every day and has a finger on the pulse of who’s buying what you’re selling. The customer support team speaks to your customers, understanding who is a good fit in the long term.

Each team has its own insight into the customer. Each input has value and it’s up to you to leverage information to create the most accurate ideal customer profiles. This will help shape who will be the best clients.

2. Expectations

When creating efficiency between departments, setting expectations is hugely important. It’s easy to get lost in the shuffle of everyday tasks and forget how much everyone has on their plates.

If a sales rep needs a piece of marketing collateral, setting a deadline and an expectation is important. What happens if a customer support rep speaks with a customer who casually mentions needing an additional service, what is the expectation of that rep to tell sales? If you are not proactively having conversations about roles and expectations, things can easily go by the wayside.

3. Processes

Maybe a sales rep wants a piece of vendor-facing sales information, or a customer service agent wants an FAQ fact sheet. Either way, what is your company’s process? How do sales and customer support teams present proposed campaigns to marketing?  Sometimes a well-intentioned sales rep may be really excited for a new prospecting campaign and frustrated that marketing hasn’t produced the collateral in the time frame he or she was hoping. Yet, if there was no deadline or pertinent information given, it’s hard for marketing to know how and where to put that initiative into its queue. Having a clear process (as well as setting expectations) will create greater efficiencies.

4. Technology Usage

How often do all your teams log into their respective technologies? Have you connected your software? Who is responsible for updating what? These are important discussions because, for instance, a CRM is not just a Rolodex and a marketing automation platform is not just a place to send emails from. There is great value and detailed data in these systems. Yet, if your teams are not using and sharing that information, it won’t get you very far.

5. The Hand Off

Yes, the hard-hitting discussion that needs to be discussed at every company. Your marketing team can create all the successful campaigns in the world, but if there is no follow-up to these lead generation efforts, then leads never become customers. Having honest and realistic conversations surrounding the hand off between marketing to sales to customer support will keep everyone on the same page and working together, instead of in opposition.

Conclusion

When it comes to supporting your customers, it’s imperative to have proactive conversations and keep the lines of communication open between all the departments that speak with them.

Do you need to better connect your software and communications efforts? Looking to have more proactive conversations? Faye can help. Contact us today.

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