At MarketLauncher, we believe the alignment of marketing and sales is a key component in building a solid sales pipeline. We are constantly looking at ways to improve this alignment with clear and precise processes. An area of focus recently has been communication as we know the effort to build a sales pipeline can be so much more effective when the marketing and sales development team are communicating directly with the outside sales team and keeping their efforts synchronized.
I personally believe in the power of communication. My team often hears me say it’s better to over communicate than to not communicate enoughWhen you think about communication in general – it’s fascinating to consider how far we have come from cave drawings to Twitter. It’s hard to believe but email was not widely used until 1998 – that’s just 20 years ago. Mobile phones were around but not common yet for businesses. Today, social media has changed how we communicate overall with family and friends and that same concept is being used by businesses including MarketLauncher.
Last year, we introduced Operation Front Row Seat to our clients. Front row seats are often considered the best seats in the house and that’s exactly what we feel our clients deserve. To do this we took our intranet communication tool and opened it up to our external clients using restricted groups. The response has been excellent!
We use the team collaboration software Zoho Connect – however, there are many of them out there – some other common ones are Slack, Flock or HipChat. What you want to look for is a software that easily allows your team to work together, collaborate and increase productivity in real time. REAL TIME are the key words here. Of course we have always collaborated with our clients and reviewed with them the campaign activity and metrics with our reporting, however a team chat tool gives our clients that Front Row Seat to the everyday inner workings of their campaign on both the marketing and sales side including:
- The content going out and to who.
- The call lists being set up.
- The reactors to their content.
- The responses from the market.
- The conversations happening on the phone.
- The sales appointments being booked.
- The weekly data reports and more…
We can discuss in real time with our client information needed to move a lead forward and we can celebrate together when we land that appointment the sales team can’t believe we just booked!
The main goal achieved here from Operation Front Row Seat was to foster the collaboration between our client’s marketing team, the MarketLauncher lead development team and the client’s sales team. Operation Front Row Seat makes this collaboration easy and in real time so marketing and sales teams can use market intel to build off of one another’s key learnings.
Let’s face it, today we all want to be able to communicate quickly, easily and from anywhere on any device – it’s what we have come to expect and demand in both our personal and business lives. With Operation Front Row Seat we are able to do just that – and of course there’s an App for the team chat software too – so no problem from a mobile device as well!
While some day – probably sooner than we think – we’ll be able to beam into our client’s office for updates – for now we are not far behind with Operation Front Row Seat – the only thing missing is the popcorn!
Mary White has been with MarketLauncher for over 13 years and resides in the Tampa, FL area.
P.S. Zoho liked how we were using their platform in this context so much, they put our testimonial on their web site. Check it out featuring our CEO Lara Triozzi here.
