Which team should you focus on to drive business growth in the medical and pharmaceutical industry: Marketing or sales? Trick question—you need both marketing and sales teams to work in tandem to provide a unified customer experience that draws in prospects, engages them, and delights them so they keep coming back for more.
Sales and marketing are two different departments that have different goals, performance metrics, and workflows, but aligning the two can be crucial for driving business growth.
The Difference between Marketing and Sales
What’s the major difference between marketing and sales? While both departments help to drive business growth in their own ways, there is a distinct difference between sales and marketing:
- Marketing focuses on attracting prospects or leads to your business.
- Sales focuses on closing deals with existing prospects brought in through marketing efforts.
Marketing platform provider HubSpot puts the difference this way: “Marketing informs and attracts leads and prospects to your company and product or service. Sales, on the other hand, works directly with prospects to reinforce the value of the company's solution to convert prospects into customers.”
Marketing can be further subdivided into two categories: Outbound (i.e. traditional) marketing and inbound marketing:
- Outbound Marketing. This marketing methodology is generally considered more interruptive and intrusive, leveraging TV ads, direct mail, or cold calling (among other techniques) to reach out to prospects directly. Here, the same message would go out to prospects regardless of their interests—resulting in a lot of untargeted effort.
- Inbound Marketing. This method leverages the internet to present marketing materials to people who may have related interests based on their online activity. For example, if someone Googles “hip implant suppliers,” then they would get served targeted ads and website pages related to hip implants, implant manufacturers, and even drugs for people to take after getting a hip replacement. Inbound marketers may even use emails to communicate with prospects who have “raised their hand” by filling out forms on the company’s website.
Both methods have their uses in the medical sales industry. In fact, outbound marketing may be more effective here than in general retail markets since the list of prospective customers is so much smaller (tens of thousands instead of hundreds of millions) and the interest in certain medical or pharmaceutical products can be assumed for specific types of practices.
For example, primary care facilities will need a constant supply of things like personal protective equipment (PPE), basic pain medications, and other single-use items. This creates an opportunity for marketing and sales teams working for manufacturers supplying these things to reach out directly.
Why Should You Align Marketing and Sales?
If the basic goal of marketing is to raise awareness about your organization and sales exists to close deals with contacts introduced by marketing, the need to align marketing and sales should be obvious. Marketing exists to fill the top of the sales funnel and help guide prospects along the journey to a closed deal.
Aligning Sales and Marketing
It’s important to note that collaboration between marketing and sales is a two-way street. While the support marketing provides to sales is obvious, to help marketing perform at its best and drive business growth, sales needs to support marketing, too.
A couple of the ways that sales can support marketing include:
- Providing Feedback on Leads. Are the leads marketing is bringing in a good fit for the company? It doesn’t matter if marketing brings in 1,000 leads a month for a medical sales company if all of those leads are just general consumers, after all! Sales can support marketing by sending reports on the quality of the leads they’re getting and providing suggestions on the ideal traits of a sales qualified lead (or on how to prep a lead better for the handoff to the sales team).
- Following up with Marketing Leads. If a marketer sends 20 leads to the sales team, and a sales rep never reaches out, will those leads help grow the company? The short answer is: “No, they won’t.” It’s up to sales to maintain and expand the relationship marketing fosters to keep customers engaged and delighted (and coming back for more in the future) once the handoff occurs. Otherwise, the marketing team’s efforts can end up going to waste.
Some of the ways that marketing can align with sales (beyond simply filling the sales funnel) include:
- Building Brand Awareness. By creating website, social media, and ad content that answers common customer questions and concerns, marketers help to attract the company’s ideal customers for the sales team to close. They also help to make the company a “household name,” something that potential customers think of whenever they need something related to the company’s products/services.
- Refining Customer Personas and Marketing Messages. Who is the ideal customer for the business? Marketing needs to assemble data based on past customers, feedback from sales and service teams, and other sources to create a profile that they can use to optimize marketing messages to have the greatest impact.
- Following Up with the Sales Team. Are the leads marketing passes on good ones? Marketing needs to follow up with sales and collect feedback to identify potential issues with the leads being passed along so marketing messaging and the handoff to sales can be optimized. This is a shared responsibility between marketing and sales to ensure consistent communication.
Benefits of Aligning Teams and Reducing Silos in Your Organization
In any organization, there can be a tendency for people in different teams with different job functions to form silos. As noted by Investopedia, these silos “operate independently and avoid sharing information.”
This refusal to share information may not be intentional. In many cases, members of a team simply focus so much on their immediate job function and following the guidance of team leads without considering how their actions impact other business units. This applies to marketing and sales teams just as much as any other business units.
Some of the potential benefits of aligning sales and marketing (and thus, eliminating silo mentalities in these two interdependent departments) include:
- Simplifying and Improving the Sales Process. One of the problems with silo mentalities in marketing and sales is that it can lead to one group not knowing what the other needs or is actively doing. For example, if marketing emphasizes or promises features/benefits that the sales team isn’t focused on, that could result in disjointed messaging to sales prospects. This means sales has to work extra to explain the promotions, products, and/or services that they’re focusing on since marketing hadn’t. By aligning the teams, messaging can be better aligned to create a consistent experience.
- Improving Sales Results. Another benefit of aligning sales and marketing so that both teams communicate clearly is that it can help improve close rates for the sales team. First, having consistent messaging means that potential clients don’t feel that they’ve been given a “bait and switch” on what attracted them to the business. Second, by sharing feedback on what is or isn’t working with prospects, the sales team can help the marketing team modify messaging to attract clients who are a better fit for the company—and thus more likely to close deals. Marketo reports that sales and marketing alignment “can lead to a 32% increase in year-over-year (YoY) revenue growth” and “38% higher sales win rates.”
- Reduced Organizational Friction. When sales and marketing aren’t aligned, it can be frustrating for members of both teams. Sales reps feel that marketing isn’t supplying the right leads to help them meet their quotas and goals. Meanwhile, marketers might feel frustrated with a lack of input and assistance from sales teams. By encouraging active communication and cooperation between marketing and sales teams, medical industry companies can reduce friction that might lead to events such as low productivity, absenteeism, and high turnover.
Achieving marketing and sales alignment is just one of many goals for a company in the medical or pharmaceutical industry to meet. However, part of achieving that alignment is having the right sales team members in place—people who have the skills, motivation, and adaptability to work hand-in-hand with marketing to maximize results!
This is where Axxelus can help.
As a contract sales organization (CSO), Axxelus specializes in helping companies in the medical/pharma sales industry find the right sales talent to drive business growth and long-term success. Reach out to the Axxelus team today to get started!
