Sales and Marketing. Quality and Collaboration.

How would you define success in your Field Marketing role? This question was posed to me not too long ago, and faster than expected my answer was: I would base it on the quality of my collaboration with sales. Quality and collaboration… let’s come back to that in a moment.
​As I made that statement I felt that the expected answer was more in line with “achieve 110% of pipeline target” or “run focused webinars across key verticals”. Yes, that is the job but success, in my opinion, comes from doing the job in a certain way. 

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Secondly, I am not sure why my response surprised me so much, as I have experienced this really working (and not), and this is where the part about quality and collaboration comes in. It’s not about always saying “yes” or even being mentioned in the internal announcements about closed deals (!) but about taking the time to educate and be educated and make sure you focus on the same end goals, in every day business, beyond the quarterly or annual business plan and QBRs.
As our world and our work has changed over the last year, the power of high quality collaboration between marketing and sales has only increased, and I can see three key areas  worth some extra focus:

• Audience - marketing needs their direct engagements, but we need to share the logic behind them with sales. There is an increased focus on the audience for Field Marketers. We’re all communicating exclusively using digital communications and hosting webinars so knowing your audience - and what matters to them - is more important than ever. When we look at intent data or levels of engagement in a waterfall model having the input and dialogue with sales is priceless.

• Support - leveraging social networks doesn’t mean that sales “do marketing” - we need to see how we can support each other.  Social selling has become a top priority over the last year. Previously, a nice to have, it’s now part of regular cadence for sales as well which means we’re often using the same tools, such as LinkedIn. Marketing is there to support sales with useful content, guidance on best practice, encouragement on action and the results and impact it brings, pre-pipe. It’s a marketer’s job to make information accessible in a digestible way, interpret and act TOGETHER with sales on early intent; do the analysis, suggest the opportunities and use the data. We are here to see the trends and early signs and share them with sales. Even when we use the same tools, sales and marketing can always benefit from each other’s perspective.

• Results and feedback – successful field marketers have a stated agreement with sales based on how they’re measured. Activities that do not meet the pipeline metrics have traditionally been hard to agree - it’s got to show result. Now, over the last year, I have seen Field Marketing activities change, and focus moved “higher in the funnel”. So, conversion to pipeline might not be the short term goal of all activities, but it is our job as marketeers to secure, explain and feedback on other metrics, such as engagement with content. Now, how can this be used in the collaboration between sales and marketing? I think the opportunities here are endless. 

MEET THE AUTHOR: ANNA PHILIPPEN
Anna has international experience from marketing, alliances and general business management. A native Swede and fluent in German, she is now settled back into Swedish life after more than a decade in the UK, South Africa and Germany. Anna loves to take an idea and run with it, make it happen with a team that cares and exceed expectations (a little competitive, are we?).  She has held positions at RSA, Dimension Data and Symantec before working with numerous other IT companies on a project basis.

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