6 Essential Questions Your Marketing Team Needs to Ask Sales

Cats and dogs. Peanut butter and tuna fish. Ammonia and bleach. Some things may seem like they’re never meant to work together, lest they fight, taste bad or even explode. Sales and marketing used to be two of those things, and they may still at times appear to be on different pages. 

• Sales team members generally push to meet their quotas, aiming for short-term gains from immediate transactions.
• Marketing team members tend to pull people in to stir up interest, aiming for longer-term strategies for building up a base of loyal fans. 

While sales and marketing do have their differences, what’s more important is what they have in common: the overall goal of increasing revenue for the company. 

Sales teams want it. Marketing teams want it. And the two can actually work in tandem to get what they both want in a highly effective and efficient way. 

Read More: How to Use HubSpot's Lead Scoring to Better Inform Your Marketing and Sales Teams

How Marketing Can Amp up Your Sales Power 

The most accomplished B2B marketers already know the deal. Ask them what the main gist of their job is, and many will say it's to help salespeople be as successful as possible. No kidding. High-performance marketing teams are in on a valuable secret:

When sales and marketing work together for a common goal, their combined efforts can produce a boost in sales productivity, marketing ROI and the company's bottom line. Your marketing team can have a direct impact on sales by:

• Leveraging data analytics to identify and target high-value prospects
• Developing multi-channel lead generation strategies
• Creating automated nurture journeys for leads at different stages
• Optimizing the digital customer journey to reduce friction
• Producing targeted content for specific buyer personas

Read More: Boost Sales Efficiency with HubSpot’s Prospecting Workspace Tool

6 Questions to Get Started 

Combining the power of the two departments starts with enhancing communication and transparency between the two groups. Have your marketing team members make the first move by interviewing your sales team members. They can kick off the conversation with six of our favorite inquiries:

• What channels are most effective for reaching decision-makers in our target market?
• What content or resources consistently help close deals?
• What are the current pain points in our customers' industries?
• How has the buying journey changed for our typical customer?
• What data or insights would help you personalize your outreach?
• Can we collaborate on creating buyer enablement content?

Read More: How to Create a Buyer Persona: the What and the Why