Technology has made it easier, cheaper and faster for people to connect to information and to each other. But entertainment, news and marketing messages are mixing together, and the average person has a hard time distinguishing between these messages.
This new reality is putting pressure on communicators to learn more about both marketing and IT. The success of our companies and our roles within our organizations lie in improving the collaboration and communication between the sales, marketing, communications and digital departments.
The goal of effective collaboration between these departments is to deliver on the goals of the organization. Here are some ways that you can begin to model and outline each team member’s role and responsibilities:
Clarify and validate your business objectives.
All too frequently, sales, marketing and communications go about their daily activities with little knowledge about what other departments are doing. These silos need to come down in order to maximize results. The easiest place to start is with an alignment meeting where each department clearly articulates their goals.
Understand your audience before you begin.
Within most organizations, there is a treasure trove of information about customers, prospects and audience demographics. Yet many organizations do not take the time to review, analyze and leverage this information. By mining available data in your sales, marketing, communications and IT departments, you will gain a better understanding of your target audience’s behaviors, preferences and attitudes.
Creating audience personas is a good way to gain buy-in and understanding across the team about what your target audience looks like. A PowerPoint slide with a photo and fake name of someone who represents your target audience, along with information about their likes and dislikes, helps team members personalize and better understand the message. Simply looking at this slide can prompt team members to ask: What would Lisa do? Would Doug respond to that message?
Develop story narratives and create a content strategy.
Once you know what makes your audience tick, it is time to create stories about your company that align with your audience’s wants and needs. Once you have done that, check back in with the marketing and sales teams to make sure that all of the messages align.
Public relations remains the best and cheapest way for organizations to generate awareness and understanding, so it is important that everyone works together to determine the cadence and channels for each of these messages.
For example, if it is important that the target audience believes your company is a good corporate citizen, then you will want to make sure that information about your ethics, your impact in the community and other reputation-building programs are effectively leveraged through paid, earned, owned and shared programs.
The cadence of these stories, while often beyond your control when it comes to earned media, is equally important. At one company where I worked, simply changing the sales presentation to talk about the company before presenting the products showed a significant increase in sales.
Agree on and track metrics.
Once everyone has agreed on the business objectives, understands the audience and has laid out a content strategy, it is important that everyone be on the same page regarding the mechanisms for tracking progress and the metrics for measuring success. Closing a sale frequently requires more than the sales team.
In my career, I have seen several occasions when trade media stories drove potential buyers to the company website for more information; through the efforts of the marketing team, this lead became a “hot” lead, which in turn was handed off to the sales department to close the deal. If the communications team had not worked out tracking with the IT and marketing departments, these efforts would never fully have been recognized as effective. And we would not be able to learn from our successes.
Uniting the skill sets across your company is critical to its long-term success, not just in terms of generating sales but also in the way that your business creates values for your customers. There is no tried-and-true model for achieving greater collaboration, but these tips will go a long way toward helping you establish a process.
