From Passive to Active: Turning "Team" Into a Verb

Most companies, and leaders for that matter, view teamwork as a passive, almost accidental achievement. Your sales and marketing employees either work well in their respective teams or they don’t.

Not only is this sentiment untrue, it takes the away responsibility of fostering teamwork and a collaborative atmosphere. After all, if your marketing team is good at bringing in leads and your sales team is good at closing business, the system is working. If everybody is doing just fine working parallel to one another, why do they need to work together?

While it’s true that sales and marketing organizations can function without working together, either within their departments or across disciplines, most leaders don’t want to scrape by with “good enough”. They want their teams to thrive.

The answer is teamwork. When teams come together, they’re able to create outputs that are far better than they could have in their silos. Good teamwork creates an end result that is bigger than the sum of everybody’s parts.

How to build that teamwork is the question. A few team building activities and endless meetings with no real purpose isn’t going to turn a bunch of people who happen to work in the same place into a group that’s playing on the same team, aligned behind the same strategies, working towards the same goal.

What's Getting in the Way of Teamwork

It’s usually pretty easy to tell if your team is working well together. Or, more accurately, it’s usually easy to see if they aren’t. The team seeming uninterested or disengaged, having ongoing negative attitudes, being late for meetings, never going to each other for help or advice, and rarely talking to each other during the work day are all red flags.

People existing in a state of frustration are rarely going to work well together, and people who are working well together likely won’t be getting as frustrated to begin with.

While the root cause of these problems can vary by organization, role, and individual preferences, the root cause of frustration often comes down to feeling like they’re being blamed or held responsible for circumstances outside of their control.

If you really want to enable your team to work well together, the first step is making sure that you’re not standing in the way of their success, unintentionally making it more difficult for them to do their jobs, or pinning their challenges on each other.

Create Solutions - Not Blame

When something goes wrong, a natural instinct is to look for someone to blame. This partially makes sense: knowing how a problem happened can help you prevent it from happening in the future. However, it doesn’t do anything to solve the problem that’s in front of you.

When you shift your focus from laying blame to finding a path forward, these challenges become opportunities to create a solution that not only solves the problem, but puts your team in a better position in the long run.

This process is called co-creation, and it’s powerful in the way that it allows everybody on the team to leverage their skills and creativity.

Here’s what it looks like:

Several years ago, a company that frequently hosted webinars as a selling tool had an issue that caused the webinar to crash twice, with all of the attendees being kicked off the platform both times. The sales and marketing teams were both frustrated, especially given how much work went into the meetings and how much revenue they usually generated.

Immediately, emails were flying, instant messages blowing up, cell phones were buzzing. Everybody was frustrated. Everybody wanted someone to blame. Everybody wanted to make it clear that they weren’t responsible.

The sales and marketing leaders recognized the start of a toxic cycle and decided to turn it into an opportunity. The two leaders told everybody on both teams to get off of their computers and join a meeting, but warned them that blame would be left at the door. This meeting was about solutions.

One by one, the team members stood up and shared ways that they could recoup the losses of the failed webinar. By the end of the meeting, they pieced together a plan of action that combined several ideas:

• All attendees would get an email with a link to a form that allowed them to request a hard copy of the CEO’s book (and add them to an email subscription list), as well as a link to the prior month’s webinar
• By the end of the week, they’d receive a call from a member of the sales team where they’d be thanked for their interest, offered the book, and asked if there were any questions they could help with.

This solution involved both the sales and marketing teams working together quickly. Having a meeting where the solution was co-created meant that no time was wasted communicating the plan or convincing anyone of its merits. The scope didn’t creep to an unmanageable level. Everybody was able to take proactive steps instead of stewing in frustration.

Short-term, the webinar ended up creating roughly the same amount of short-term revenue as the ones that went off without a hitch. Long-term, however, the impact was much different. Several of the people who were called scheduled follow-ups. Many of the folks who received a book and joined the email list reached out to schedule meetings months after the fact. Some of them even passed the book onto a friend or colleague. Over time, the failed webinar actually generated more income than previous ones.

When it was time to have another webinar, the team didn’t go back to their old way of doing things. Instead, they proactively sent out the email with the link to request the book, which was also sent as a follow-up after the meeting. If somebody expressed interest but ultimately didn’t register, they received a call from the sales team. Every single person who attended the webinar was contacted within a week of it.

The solutions that were created to handle a problem actually identified a major opportunity to improve their processes.

It's a Team Sport

Just because sales and marketing have different roles and strengths doesn’t mean they can’t work together. In fact, teams rarely all play the same position on the field (and they likely wouldn’t win if they did).

When sales and marketing teams work together, communicate well, and focus on their shared goals, they play with strategy. They play with intention. They capitalize on each other’s strengths and support each other’s weaknesses. They don’t just become a stronger team - they become stronger individual players.

Bringing out the best in your teams will bring out the best in each person on them - and vice versa.

Learn More

A healthy relationship between sales and marketing is vital to an organization’s success. Dive deep into this effective strategy in our book  Sales & Marketing Alignment. If you'd like more insights on how you can improve your sales leadership, contact us.