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Sales' New MVP: Marketing

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This article is more than 7 years old.

This article is by Justin Shriber, senior director, global marketing, LinkedIn Sales Solutions at LinkedIn.

In the last two decades I’ve seen sales and marketing trends come and go -- the birth of CRM, migration to the cloud, mobility and predictive analytics are just a few.

But something recently caught me by surprise – marketers are now key in deciding which sales products are purchased by an organization. For nearly two decades, I’ve focused on developing, marketing and selling sales and marketing automation, and it’s been my experience that sales and marketing often operate in silos. However, more and more, I’m spending my time with both sides of the organization as ideas are shared and sales products are bought. And in many cases, these are products funded by marketing, who not only is involved in the purchasing cycle, but is also there to ensure tools are successfully deployed and used by sales.

There are two factors driving marketing’s newfound interest in sales solutions. First, marketing and sales have aligned around common metrics like deal close rates and total bookings. This shared interest drives marketers’ desire to spend on solutions that bring the highest ROI, regardless of who uses them. Second, thanks to sophisticated attribution models, marketers can now identify they impact of their efforts on a deal-by-deal basis.

Also, it’s probably no surprise that as social media has become a big driver for sales intelligence, sales orgs are becoming savvy about how they make it work for them. I’ve seen brands build things like the social media hub -- a system for following real-time social updates that sales teams use to connect with prospects and customers. This gives sales the ability to reach out to customers at the right time by monitoring signals that may indicate intent to buy (for example, job changes or a sudden increase in hiring). Conversations with customers on social not only gives marketing more visibility into the actions of sales, but it also brings them to the center of the sales process.

Because marketing is seeing greater incentive for playing a role in sales growth, I’ve seen them host things like social media and sales-prospecting sessions, where they coach sales on how to use social networks to transition a cold-call relationship to a warm lead.

Sales has also benefitted from this relationship in the form of content. Marketing provides a steady stream of specialized material sales can share with their networks in order to stay top of mind with customers. Whether it’s a noteworthy article by an industry influencer, or a stats-centric infographic, content is surfaced to sales by marketing to be shared far and wide.

The two teams are also working together to identify targets. This allows account executives to narrow their focus, driving quality conversations with a smaller number of prospects. More marketing-qualified leads means that sales spends less time searching and more time selling.

This “stronger together” approach is paying out in dividends for many, and I don’t expect this to slow down any time soon. When sales and marketing view themselves as members of a common revenue engine, walls that have traditionally separated them fall. When done right, it could mean accelerating lead generation, bringing companies one step closer to closing deals.