A common problem in B2B is the lack of trust between marketing operations and sales. These two teams can have a precarious relationship, especially if something goes wrong. However, there are several things you can do to build trust with sales and really have them understand the value marketing operations can provide to help them close deals.

So what can you do to prove your worth to sales? 🤔

Here we have 5 ways that marketing ops can win over their sales team:

1. Fix Your Leaky Funnel  

Make sure you audit your full lead creation to sales process and look for issues. Do not be the reason why sales is missing high-quality leads because the lead is not making it to the right rep or even into the CRM. Common issues to watch out for are:

• CRM Sync errors - we’ve all seen this. A lead can enter your marketing automation platform but not get synced to SFDC.
• Lead/Contact Routing errors - make sure the routing logic in LeanData or any other routing tool is assigning correctly and not throwing errors.
• Not MQL-ing / surfacing leads properly - check your scoring and your lifecycle program to ensure the right leads are actually sent to sales.
• Enrichment tool not correctly worked into order of operations - ensure you have enough info to score and route properly before syncing to CRM.
• Barriers/too many suppressions for “hand raisers” - make sure any lead who wants to speak to you does.

2. Faster and Better Delivery of Inbound Leads to Sales

Who doesn’t like faster and better, right? Sales certainly does. Below are ways to create a seamless system that would make an efficient delivery to sales:

• Surface the best or “hot” leads to sales right away - Whether it is someone booking a meeting through your website, requesting a demo, or simply filling out a contact us form, make sure to minimize the time for that lead to reach the right salesperson.
• Have an actionable alert system - Salespeople work in multiple systems, so setting up ways to alert the appropriate person or team and give them data that is actionable is super important. Emails can be overwhelming and sometimes overlooked, so we suggest Slack alerts instead.
• Drop into correct cadence in sales tool - Instead of requiring the reps to add inbound leads to a sales followup tool like SalesLoft or Outreach, take the initiative by triggering them into the sequence directly and then the salesperson can complete the first step.

In a market that is economically challenged at the moment, where there may be less buyers of your product, you cannot miss an opportunity. So for marketing ops, the last thing you want is to be the scapegoat for losing an opportunity.

3. Provide the Team Actionable Data

Data is everywhere. We live and breathe data but it can get overwhelming, so having data that is useful and actionable for sales is a game changer. Here are ways to make this happen:

• Provide intent data - Intent data can help sales people understand where there may be an opportunity within an account. Make sure to surface this data to reps where it’s relevant (and make sure it's current!).
• Build out contact data for target accounts - Salespeople have a lot on their plate as it is, so making sure your database has enough contacts in their target accounts to reach out to is one step they don’t have to worry about.
• Display meaningful activity data in lead/contact views - Build better views that display elements such as lead grade, account tier, intent data, and behavior data. Having everything on one page makes follow-up a breeze.
• Create target account insights dashboards - This can be created in numerous ways, whether it’s for a team, for all of sales, specific individuals. Whichever way, a one-stop place to see activity and insights on their target accounts is a gold mine for sales.

4. Create a Way to Book Time Directly with Sales

Sounds simple enough, right? There are tools out there like Drift or ChiliPiper that you can leverage to have leads book time directly with sales. Two reasons why this is an advantage:

• Better for the prospect - if they are interested in booking a meeting, just let them, don’t rely on the rep having to get back to them to schedule.
• Eliminate lag time for the prospects - leads who are interested and have reached out, most likely have done their research and this way, you can avoid run-arounds for them and capture their interest by immediately getting time on their calendars.

Like we said, sales is busy and so is your prospect. Reduce the run-around for both of them and get that meeting booked ASAP!.

5. Automated Sales Engagement for Lower Quality

One final, but very impactful thing a marketing ops team can do for their sales team is to assist them in allocating their time properly. A way to do this is by setting a way to automate the followup for lower priority leads, so they can really give the cream of the crop its due diligence and personalize their efforts.

If we expect our sales team to really spend the time doing research, finding more people at the account to target, and put in enough attempts to connect, then you need them focused on a smaller pool of people at one time. By automating the effort for lower priority leads, sales have more time to focus on the best accounts and still are happy knowing all their leads are being “qualified.”

We understand, sales can be a tough crowd to please, but when you really focus on how they can do their jobs better and easier, then you can really get their support.

But with these strategies in place, you can turn sales into your BFF and a big champion for you and your marketing ops team internally.

For more of an in-depth analysis and a fun listen, check out fwd: thinking episode 25 where we dive into this very topic!