3 Strategies for Building Trust Between Sales and Marketing

By Win Salyards, Marketing Consultant at Heinz Marketing

Aligning your sales and marketing teams can be a daunting task, and one of the main hurdles to overcome is getting over the trust gap between sales and marketing. Many surveys have shown marketing and sales teams frequently don’t trust each other in their work. So, how do you push past that barrier? Here are 3 strategies for building trust between sales and marketing.

Tying compensation to marketing KPI performance.

This can seem like a crazy strategy and one that might sound impossible. However, sales teams come to mistrust their marketing counterparts because they see marketing as having no skin in the game. Salespersons are compensated based on sales numbers. They’re held accountable for their performance. In contrast, marketing can seem like they can do what they want without worry. To correct this, key marketing team members involved in the lead generation strategies should have a portion of their compensation based on what they generate.

Marketing joining sales meetings when they need to communicate something

When marketing has something to communicate with sales, rather than putting together a complete marketing meeting and dragging sales out on their own to share it, marketing leaders should meet sales at their level at the weekly sales meeting. By meeting sales where they’re are, marketing leaders respect their sales counterparts by working within their schedule and in a comfortable format.

Shadowing

During sales training, it is common practice for sales members to shadow more experienced colleagues. There is no reason why new (and old) marketing team members shouldn’t follow their sales counterparts. Shadowing helps team members see how things are done live with great examples. For marketing, seeing how sales work and do their jobs will give them much better insight into how they can help sales with compelling content, messaging, and sales enablement cadences.

Building trust between sales and marketing teams is a long process. These 3 strategies will go a long way toward achieving that, and in the process, further your marketing and sales alignment goals. Happy selling.