Drive greater sales and marketing efficiency by overcoming these process challenges

This is a guest post written by Alexa Franck, Sr. Content Marketing Manager at GoLinks.

Do you feel like your team could be working more efficiently?

If you’re in sales or marketing, you know that processes are key to an efficient workday — and there’s always room for improvement. However, according to BpTrends, only 4% of companies actually track and manage their processes.

As someone in marketing, I’ve seen first-hand the negative effects that mediocre processes can have. So this article will cover some of the most common challenges that slow teams down. Plus, we’ll provide some proven tips on overcoming them for greater success in your sales and marketing efforts.

5 process challenges for sales & marketing teams

• Challenge 1: Cross-Departmental Knowledge Silos
• Challenge 2: Disorganized Marketing Collateral
• Challenge 3: Lack of Sales & Marketing Alignment
• Challenge 4: Incompatible Tech Stacks
• Challenge 5: Defaulting to Manual Tasks

Challenge 1: Cross-departmental knowledge silos

In the world of sales and marketing, knowledge silos can quickly become a significant roadblock to success. These silos arise when employees fail to communicate and share resources outside of their own teams.

For example, if a marketing team creates a great persona-based blog article, but fails to share it with the right people on the sales team, that team might not know it even exists.

To promote better cross-departmental collaboration, it is essential to break down these barriers. Regular communication through the right channels is key.

💡Pro Tip: Establish proper communication channels for project-related requests and clarify the process for sharing documents or other knowledge with people on different teams. And remember — just because a process worked at one of your previous companies, doesn’t mean it’ll work at this one.

Challenge 2: Disorganized marketing collateral

What’s the point of marketing collateral if no one can even find it?

65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects — a common complaint expressed by sales teams.

When organization breaks down, a sales team might not know where to locate the sales enablement materials that are available for them to use. They may spend hours searching for the right piece of collateral; even then, they may not be confident that it is the most up-to-date or relevant piece.

Organizational issues can also lead to inconsistencies in messaging and branding. If SDRs use outdated or incorrect collateral, it creates confusion and erodes trust with potential customers. This can ultimately damage the organization's reputation and bottom line.

So it’s essential for sales and marketing teams to prioritize the organization and accessibility of their marketing collateral to ensure that it supports, rather than hinders, their efforts.

💡Pro tip: Use a tool like GoLinks to make marketing collateral such as sales decks and case studies super easy to find. With this tool, you can take any long URL and make it a short, memorable go link like go/one-pagers. This way, your team can intuitively find exactly what they need without searching through apps, folders, or bookmarks.

Challenge 3: Lack of sales & marketing alignment

In an attempt to improve sales and marketing alignment, a company I worked at brought these two functions together under the same team. Unfortunately, this alone wasn’t enough to fix the synergy issues.

For example, if a marketing team creates content that is not aligned with the sales team's needs, it can result in a failure to generate qualified leads. Similarly, if a sales team does not provide feedback to the marketing team on the quality and effectiveness of their leads, it can lead to a disconnect between the two teams.

So it’s super important for sales and marketing teams to work together closely and align their efforts to drive success for the organization as a whole. In fact, 87% of sales and marketing leaders say collaboration between their departments enables business growth.

💡Pro tip: Bring your teams together for important meetings. For example, marketing could attend the weekly pipeline reviews. You can also have your sales team take notes of questions that prospects ask on sales calls. Feed those questions to marketing to help influence future content.

Challenge 4: Incompatible tech stacks

Let’s say you’re a marketer working on an article directed toward one of your target personas. You are using a project management tool to keep track of this project and, at a certain point, want to involve sales to get some input. If sales doesn’t use this same project management tool, you can’t just tag them in the project — you’ll have to manually send them all the information.

This isn’t an ideal way to collaborate.

Your martech stack will naturally be different than your sales tech stack — but some overlap will give you a big advantage. For things like knowledge management, task management, and communication, using the same tools will make sales and marketing processes a ton easier.

💡Pro tip: Conduct yearly tech stack audits to ensure your teams use tech that overlaps where it matters.

Challenge 5: Defaulting to manual tasks

McKinsey has found that in 60% of jobs, one-third of the tasks required by employees could be automated. That’s a lot!

Plus, companies that incorporate high-level automation into their sales process generate around 16% more leads compared to those that incorporate low-level or no automation.

Defaulting to manual tasks that could be automated causes process challenges for sales and marketing teams in several ways.

One major challenge is the lack of scalability. Manual tasks are often limited in terms of how much they can be scaled up. For instance, manually sending out emails to a large number of prospects may take a significant amount of time and resources, making it difficult for sales and marketing teams to reach a wider audience.

Another challenge is the lack of flexibility. Manual tasks are often rigid and inflexible, making it difficult to adapt to changing market conditions or customer needs. For instance, if a company wants to change its marketing message or strategy, it may take a long time to manually update all the relevant materials.

Automating these tasks would make it easier to adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs, allowing sales and marketing teams to be more flexible and responsive.

💡Pro tip: Invest in a data activation platform like Clearbit to automate sales and marketing activities such as lead routing, intent-based outreach, and conversion tracking. With a tool like Clearbit, your teams will be able to save time and get in-depth insights to drive more sales.

Bridging the gap between sales and marketing

It’s time to refresh the processes keeping your teams from optimal efficiency! By addressing these common challenges and implementing some of the pro tip changes above, sales and marketing teams can achieve greater success.