Sales and marketing have always walked hand in hand, but now in the wake of the digital revolution, they are taking turns carrying each other, while running towards the destination. Digital marketing has truly changed the landscape of business and if your teams aren’t symbiotic and interpreting data together as part of a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy, your business and brand will suffer.
Thankfully, there are many great tools that can connect your staff, and if used properly, everyone can be on the same course to success. Tools can give us valuable insight into our customers’ behaviours, automate our marketing tasks, and help our marketing growth strategy, but they can’t do it alone.
Your team need to play nice together, while building each other up. It might sound like a simple concept, but many organizations lack the connectivity they need from a human perspective. You can have all of the tools you need, but if your not connecting your players and empowering them with understanding, all you have is tools.
Take A Little Time
Keeping your team members on the same page isn’t a tough task, it’s just a task that is often overlooked. We all know that time is more valuable than ever, and becomes more so every day. Taking the time to properly educate your team on the functionality and results that your tools can provide, is an essential piece to your “success puzzle”. Too often, people know that a feature or piece of data exists, but they have no idea how it came to be, or how, why, and when they can use it. You need to train your teams, together. Foster human connectivity between your teams and educate them on your tools.
I Am The Gatekeeper
No gatekeepers. Well, sort of. It is of course important to have experts within your organization, but your people should be empowered to tackle tasks on their own. Think about how you’d feel if you were still driving a car on your mom or dad’s lap….not great.
Creating user access and different roles with your software is a valuable methodology that exists for a reason, don’t stop doing that, but if your employee needs to accomplish a task, they should know how they can.
Again, this comes down to education. Setup training session after training session, virtual or real, until everyone is an expert craftsman and superbly handy with the tools your business provides them. Your brand will thank you in the long term.
Keep It Real
Having expectations for the way your team embrace and master a piece of software or other tool is great, but you have to be gentle with your team. Think about the driving analogy again if you need to. Don’t expect everyone to jump in the driver’s seat and provide you with fully automated analytic reports or triggered email campaigns within the first week or even month of implementing a solution.
People need the freedom to learn, practice, and execute results. Your sales and marketing teams want to work together, and when they are all experts building from each other’s successes, they will naturally become more powerful, but you need to have reasonable expectations, and plans to keep them all on the same page.
Again…don’t let anyone horde knowledge, and respect the speed at which your team members adapt to your organization’s workflow. If you can focus on these things, you’re going to achieve great things within your company’s culture and profits.
We here at Oracle Tree understand the importance of a cohesive team, effective digital marketing strategies, and strive towards having an effective company culture! If you are interested in finding out what Oracle Tree can do for you, click here for more information.
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