Integrating the two departments greatly boosts the efficacy of both-and often requires only a few changes in the relationship between the two. We’ll discuss just a few of the ways you can immediately begin the integration of sales and marketing.

Establish a Service Level Agreement Between Sales and Marketing

• In this context, a service-level agreement (SLA) clarifies and delineates team commitments. It establishes areas each team should be focusing and the goals each team should be meeting to uphold the joint effort between the two, such as successful follow-up of leads by the sales team and proper generation of qualified leads by the marketing team.
• Without such an agreement, teams can work at cross-purposes by focusing on different sales streams or lose efficiency by overlapping-a sales team backed by a marketing team generating a high volume of qualified leads does not need to focus time on lead generation.
• Proper marketing waterfall analytics integrated to inside sales and field sales processes become very important here, as you must be able to view data across every stage of the customer buying process and implement standards and goals into the SLA that match to the analytics. Expectations without a firm backing by data can only lead to team friction and failures. This leads directly into item number two.

Maintain an Integrated and Detailed Customer Relationship Management Program

» Read more: Three Sales and Marketing Integration Tips You Can Use Right Now

Till now, many people are still confused regarding the terms ‘sales and marketing’. Often, some think that they are one and the same.
But they’re not.

It’s true that sales and marketing work hand in hand in almost the same way, but they still got dissimilar definitions. For business owners, in taking note of the differences, they can easily move toward both areas smoothly. Here are the differences.

* Sales is all about getting the customers to purchase goods, whereas marketing is about finding the customers. With the latter, the staff would have to look for methods on how to get people that are not yet doing business with their firm. Marketing people have to concentrate on creating one’s brand as a whole package look as if it’s interesting and credible. Marketing specialises on giving only the best reputation of their company.

On the other hand, sales ensures that the customers buy the goods and services when they are already engaged at the firm. The sales people are the ones that deal with many things especially regarding how the staff interact with the customers, plus how to make the offer to the customers make it seem more attractive. Generally speaking, the function of the sales team never really dedicate too much on the business establishment itself, but rather directly on each products or services which their company offers.

» Read more: Exploring the Differences Between Sales and Marketing for Business Success

We are aware that companies by default operate through the makeup of various functions such as

• Accounting
• Finance
• Supply chain / Logisitics
• Human resources

and of course that of Sales and Marketing. Now, both sales and marketing play vital roles in the running of the business. Without one, you are not going to be able to run a business successfully and see the results that you were hoping to see. They both require a lot of time and effort, which is why so many businesses are investing so much into them and rightly so. To gain even more, though, it may be a smart idea to get them to work together as we often see conflict between the two functions when we delve into the day to day operations of a company.

Often the sales force blames the marketing department for not providing market intelligence that is of a high enough quality that will enable them to get the results that the business needs to grow. And on the other hand we see that the marketing department apportions blame towards the sales force for not developing the sales leads effectively as identified by the marketing plan.

When the business is working as one, instead of having everything separated, it is possible to work like an efficient, improved machine. There is a lot more to gain for future growth and there is a lot more money to be made.

» Read more: Getting Sales and Marketing to Work Together in a Business