9 Ways to Resolve Conflict Between Your Sales and Marketing Teams

How to resolve conflicts between your sales and marketing teams

Differing business goals and roles often fuel marketing-sales disharmony. Consider the following nine strategies to help your marketing and sales teams work together more efficiently. 

1. Define each department’s role in your organization.

Role confusion is one of the leading causes of conflict between sales and marketing teams. To prevent this issue, you must redefine roles and ensure that each department understands its responsibilities. Here are some tips for doing so: 

• Outline each role’s expectations. 
• Establish which key performance indicators (KPIs) will be measured.
• Determine to whom each team member is accountable. 
• Cross-train team members so they get a greater appreciation for what the “opposite side” does.

2. Outline the benefits of sales and marketing teams working together.

Sometimes, your sales and marketing teams see things in terms of workplace competition. Team members want to secure their budgets and positions and may not see the benefits of working together.

Managers and leaders must communicate why collaboration is essential. You must understand how much time is spent on each task and determine whether your budget is being used effectively. Explain how workplace collaboration reduces conflict while saving time and money. 

Even better, share how collaboration helps your business provide a great customer experience for potential and existing clients.

3. Create a cohesive sales and marketing strategy.

Marketing generates sales leads and sales teams are responsible for lead conversions. Without marketing, your sales team wouldn’t have leads and, without a sales team, your marketing team wouldn’t have the feedback it needs to improve marketing campaigns. 

Explain to your teams that your business growth strategy must have both components. A successful, cohesive sales and marketing strategy may look like this:

• The marketing team creates a marketing strategy based on existing sales data.
• The marketing team generates leads via marketing campaigns.
• The sales team receives leads.
• The sales team offers the marketing team feedback on lead quality.
• The sales team closes new clients and makes deals.
• The sales team generates revenue to be funneled into future marketing campaigns.
• The marketing team uses new sales data and feedback to fine-tune marketing campaigns.

Each team plays a crucial role in the sales process. When they work together, your business growth strategy becomes more efficient and effective.

4. Improve communication between the sales and marketing teams.

The right approach and tools can resolve miscommunication between departments. By outlining everyone’s roles from the beginning, team members will know whom to contact if they need help with a particular issue. Ensure everyone’s contact information is readily available.

Mark Voronov, co-founder and CEO of SocialPlug, emphasized the importance of creating an environment where open communication and cooperation are encouraged. “It is achievable through routine meetings whereby the two teams are able to express their goals and problems,” Voronov explained. “I personally teach my team to redefine their tasks so that each department will understand what is required of them. As it turned out, this minimal change prevented a lot of overlaps and miscommunications.”

Tools like Asana or Slack for workplace communication can help keep departments working together. These apps allow team members to chat in real time, assign tasks, share resources and keep a written record of each project.

5. Share resources through knowledge bases.

Various knowledge base tools and software options are available online for collecting, organizing and distributing resources to your sales and marketing teams. Team members can add essential documents to the knowledge base, such as client files, marketing materials and analytics reports, or access existing docs in real time. This setup ensures that everyone has the information they need when they need it.

Chris Kirksey, CEO of Direction.com, advises building a comprehensive resource document that serves as both a strategic framework and a practical guide, including company best practices, product development and HR-related resources. 

“This document should include a clear organizational structure with a joint synchronization committee, a detailed Service Level Agreement defining shared metrics and lead criteria, established communication protocols, unified messaging guides, shared incentive structures and complete process documentation for customer journeys and lead handoffs,” Kirksey noted.

6. Give sales and marketing teams access to a shared CRM.

Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps teams collect, organize and access essential customer data, including contact details, purchase history and past interactions with your company. The best CRM software can hold detailed records about the following:

• How leads and clients engaged with marketing efforts — for example, your email open rates and email click-through rate
• Whether they used coupons 
• If they visited your product pages
• If they responded to a cold call
• Whether or not they requested a quote 
• Notes on meetings with agents or representatives 

When both sales and marketing teams update a shared CRM, everyone can automatically access valuable insights to help them work more effectively. For example:

• Marketing: If the marketing team knows a specific product is generating numerous quote requests, they’ll know to create even more demand by placing ads for that product in that area. 
• Sales: The sales teams can run detailed CRM reports on customer browsing behavior to learn what products or calls to action generated the most clicks and interest. This information can help them personalize conversations about specific products and offers and close more deals.

7. Be proactive in resolving conflicts between departments.

Don’t let workplace conflict stew. Take action as soon as you see tension arise. A biting remark or a passive-aggressive email should prompt you to ask, “What isn’t working? How can this be fixed?” instead of waiting for things to blow up.

As the person in charge, you can nip tension in the bud when you spot it. Ask for clarification, offer solutions and help your teams problem-solve before they resort to harmful behaviors.

8. Encourage cross-departmental problem-solving.

Sometimes, issues arise that require an interdepartmental solution. For example, your sales team may want better leads, which is a task for the marketing team. Similarly, your marketing team may want feedback on a campaign’s digital marketing return on investment (ROI), which the sales team could provide.

Use meetings as opportunities to encourage cross-departmental problem-solving. Set aside time for both teams to work together to resolve their issues. You may be pleasantly surprised by what they come up with.

9. Offer incentives for collaboration.

Set shared goals and reward everyone when they achieve these goals. When your sales and marketing teams learn that working together means massive rewards, they’ll be less likely to compete with each other.

It doesn’t have to be an “us vs. them” situation. Collaboration can pay off in rewards from upper management, employee bonuses or commissions on revenue increases.

Why sales and marketing teams have conflicts

Here are some possible reasons your sales and marketing teams aren’t seeing eye to eye:

• Lack of communication: If your sales and marketing teams exist as stand-alone departments, their issues may stem from poor communication. When there’s not much overlap between departments, it can be challenging for teams to communicate, collaborate and work productively.
• Role confusion: Many tasks, such as strategizing, following up on leads and relaying messages to different departments, could fall under both the sales and marketing umbrellas. If your team members aren’t sure who does what, there can be redundancies. On the flip side, both teams may overlook tasks.
• Unclear goals: When both teams work toward a shared goal, it’s easier to collaborate. Unclear end goals — or separate, unaligned goals — can create conflict and inefficiencies.
• Too much competition: Say your business-to-business marketing team wants a bigger budget to create marketing materials and launch new ad campaigns, but your sales managers want a larger budget for helpful sales tools and employee training. If the budget is limited, both teams compete to get what they want. This can lead to stress, resentment and even jealousy.
• Personality differences: Each department tends to attract different types of people. Salespeople are often charismatic and relationship-focused. In contrast, marketers are typically more analytical and methodical. These personality differences can lead to misunderstandings and tension, almost as if your teams spoke different languages.
• Conflicting strategies: Each team will have its own ideas for what will work to grow your company. Your marketing team may want to focus on social media marketing, while your sales team may prefer a more targeted lead-generation campaign. If teams disagree on the best course of action, this can lead to significant conflict. Stagnation, bottlenecks, pipeline gaps and ineffective campaigns are all possible side effects of teams not seeing eye to eye on strategy.
• Different approaches: Juan Castellanos, senior marketing manager of SecureSpace, noted that sales and marketing have inherently different approaches, which can lead to conflict. “Marketing focuses on generating leads and brand awareness while sales is driven by closing deals, leading to frustration when one side feels the other isn’t delivering,” Castellanos explained. “A common issue is when marketing hands off leads that sales deems unqualified or when sales doesn’t follow up on leads that marketing has nurtured.” It takes a considerable budget for marketing to deliver mostly qualified leads and it takes time and persistence for sales to convert them.

Benefits of sales and marketing teams working together

As you guide your sales and marketing teams toward mutual respect and understanding, your business will enjoy the following benefits: 

• Better communication: When your sales and marketing teams work together effectively, you can expect better communication, fewer misunderstandings and less tension.
• Increased collaboration: Resolving the significant conflicts between your teams effectively makes it easier for your marketers and salespeople to collaborate, work toward shared goals and solve problems.
• More effective strategies: Sales and marketing can work together as a unit. With better collaboration, it’s easier to connect the marketing strategy bringing in leads and the sales strategy closing them. The process can work like a well-oiled machine.
• Higher ROI: Inefficiencies between your teams can eat up your budget. When both departments work together, your campaigns are more likely to succeed and improve your marketing ROI, so your budget doesn’t go to waste.
• Less stress and animosity: A low-stress work environment is better for everyone. It’s time to put jealousy, animosity and tension to rest for good.

Voronov stressed that the biggest benefit of a unified sales-marketing approach is improved customer satisfaction. “When the salespeople and marketers collaborate in harmony, the rewards are palpable,” Voronov said. “The uniform effort yields a uniform customer experience, improved quality of leads and finally, increased revenue.”

Jennifer Dublino contributed to this article.