Sales success is a team sport

Recently, Orum’s VP of Marketing, Ting Ting Luo, and our VP of Sales, Colin Specter, took the stage at SaaStr Annual to present how Orum consistently wins through collaboration. Alignment between sales and marketing should be common practice but the truth is that, oftentimes, they are rowing in opposite directions.

At Orum, we spend a great deal of time thinking about how our sales and marketing teams can remain in sync but also what that looks like in daily practice. In their presentation, Colin and Ting Ting presented on four points that we emphasize and why they continue to help us grow in the market.

Watch the presentation

Investments in your brand shrink the sales cycle

Brand isn’t marketing’s responsibility alone and brand awareness doesn’t just come from spending on ads. We’ve found that investments in your brand are CAC deflators. They reduce your customer acquisition cost because they speed up the selling process.

Every time a prospect has a touchpoint with someone from Orum, it’s an opportunity to grow the relationship between prospects and our brand. We constantly emphasize our brand voice and tone to the wider team so that it’s consistent regardless of whether you’re attending a webinar, watching a demo, or reading a report we just released.

Shavings make a pile

You need kindling to make a fire. Without them, you’re just staring at a pile of logs. Seek out incremental improvements across your funnel and conversion rates that you can compile over time. They quickly become a force multiplier.

At Orum, this is something as simple as requiring phone fields on forms. The phone is (obviously) our highest performing channel so we want to make sure we can get people on the phone as quickly as possible. Find ways you can cut through the noise and simplify the time to connect. We all spend so much time seeking out hand-raising prospects, so when you find them, you need to connect with them as quickly as possible.

Get obsessive with understanding buying committees.

Lean into the buying personas at your own organization and understand the questions they want answered. Of course, we build out customer personas so we can better appreciate the problems the prospects are facing but it’s deeper than that. Everybody at your organization is someone else’s buyer persona.

Constantly ask this question–How has the buying committee changed? Connect with the people at your company that you would want to connect with at a prospect’s organization and ask them what they need to do their job better. Then, your sales and marketing teams are better equipped to address these questions during the buyer journey before they’re even asked.

Stop assuming you know the expectations of other teams.

Ask other teams at your organization what their expectations are, and then use decision making frameworks like RAPID to speed up the process to alignment. Assure your teams aren’t just in the boat together, but that you’re rowing in the same direction.

When you’re able to put your ego aside and discover what other people at your organization are expecting from you, then you can better align on creating processes, content, and sequences that actually solve team needs.