🛑 STOP: Before reading this article, please be aware that Meta/Facebook Workplace is closing and will shortly migrate to Workvivo by Zoom. To find out more, please read our blog, Transition from Workplace to Workvivo: A Guide for Workplace Users
Sales and marketing have had a historic rivalry since day one. Both teams clash over budget, cultural differences and misaligned expectations and roles, despite being on the same 'team' and driving towards a shared goal of growth.
To achieve a truly aligned or even integrated commercial team, it takes a disciplined approach from management to build that relationship. During this post I'm going to run through the ways that anyone can help align both departments and end this unnecessary rivalry, with a revolutionary communication and collaboration tool, Workplace by Facebook.
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To rebuild any kind of relationship, communication and transparency is key, especially now that we're in an age where remote working is becoming the norm. So with more people away from the office, you can no longer rely on catching someone one afternoon to run through things, you must be proactive.
Workplace Chat is a great way to keep the conversation moving. It's standalone instant messaging app that can be installed on your mobile or desktop device, and as soon as your team adopts it, you will never look at email for internal comms again.
Email for internal comms is dying, fast.
Now, I'm not slating email because it's no longer hot new tech, because it still serves a purpose in a lot of areas. However, in terms of internal comms, Chat is just so much easier!
Everyone here at Generation Digital works remotely, and since joining the team I have been exposed to a lot of cool tools, but Chat has to be the most convenient to date. I feel more connected here than I did working in an office, and that's probably down to the incredibly fast response time of instant messaging compared to email.
If you're unsure of a colleague's role or responsibilities in connection with your request, you can check out their profile to understand their role in the team.
If you're in a large organisation with a heavily populated hierarchy within each department, you can look at the Workplace Org Chart to find out where a particular person sits within the company or department.
If marketing were to conduct a poll, asking sales to identify the top challenges and pain points customers face before buying your product/service, they would have first-hand experience in dealing with those challenges and that sort of shared intelligence would be extremely valuable in planning content.
The same goes for sales, you could get feedback on things like presentations, so that they comply with corporate branding and messaging.
This comes up again below when I give you the secret sauce in sales and marketing alignment, with Workplace groups.
Before we move on to groups, there's a cool little feature called Events which allows you to create and schedule an upcoming event (similar to Facebook events). This is a great way to collaborate on trade shows, which is often worked on by both sales and marketing.
Creating an event not only provides calendar visibility, but you can also collaborate and discuss its progress from within the event.
I've saved the best for last, this is far by my most powerful tip. Groups is the engine which drives collaboration in Workplace, and here are a few creative ways to use groups to improve sales and marketing alignment:
In conclusion, we've seen Workplace customers drastically improve the relationship between marketing and sales, and also internal comms and collaboration throughout the whole business.
If you're not familiar with Workplace by Facebook, check out our recorded webinar on the 6 Disruptive Reasons why Workplace by Facebook is the next Big Thing.