It can be tricky navigating different teams as a marketer – and incredibly challenging to collaborate in a remote or hybrid work environment.
Each team has its internal processes, communication preferences, and collaboration standards. But marketers need to work across each team to drive results and get buy-ins from key stakeholders.
So how do marketers improve cross-collaboration with teams working remotely? What’s the best way to gain respect and understanding from every department?
We’ll be tackling all these questions and more in today’s guide. You’ll find 2022’s best practices and expert-level tips for marketers working with:
- Sales
- Design teams
- Developers
- Customer support
- Leadership
How to work with sales
The work of marketing and sales teams goes hand-in-hand—marketers craft the content to attract leads and the sales team closes the deal. Here are a few tips to get on the same page and improve your pipeline:
Understand how sales interact with leads and customers
Being an effective cross-functional team starts with questions. What does someone in sales do on a daily basis? How do they take marketing’s prospects and turn them into first-time buyers and happy customers? Scheduler regular sync meetings with sales to understand their process and how both teams can become more cohesive.
Once you understand the sales process, you’ll have a better idea of how you can help them close more. Ideally, it would be best to shadow someone in the department for a day to see how they work in real-time. But if you’re working with remote teams, you may want to:
- See if you can listen to sales call recordings
- Check out emails or social media messages
- Take a look at their workflows to better understand daily responsibilities, tasks, and goals
- Hop on their virtual department meetings
Gaining this first-hand intel may help you spot gaps in the process that your department can fill with a smart sales enablement process.
Develop a sales enablement strategy
Sales enablement refers to providing your sales team with resources and content that helps them sell more effectively. Marketers can write and produce content, customer case studies, video tutorials, FAQs, email templates, and other supplementals to sway prospects toward converting.
So if you see that leads tend to drop off around a specific point in the sales process, marketing can brainstorm ideas to keep leads progressing through the funnel.
If you’re using a sales enablement tool, you can organize all these pieces of supporting content to pair with where your leads are in the buyer’s journey. You’ll empower sales with the right info to use at precisely the right time.
This can also be accomplished using monday.com Work OS. This operating system helps businesses break out of team silos by centralizing data from multiple tools and contextualizing team communication and collaboration. Work OS could be exactly what your marketing and sales teams need to be more aligned with one another.
How to work with design
Marketers and design teams both understand their customers’ needs and expectations. While marketers use compelling words to attract customers, designers create a visually engaging experience that draws them into the physical product/service and brand.
Provide visual inspirations
When assigning projects to design, send over a few visual examples of what you’re going for. Your design point of contact (POC) could say something like, “We really like X’s concept on this page [include link or screenshot], but we’d like it to be more [insert specific goal].”
Give design as many details as possible. Tell your design POC exactly what you like and don’t like about the examples you send over. Share this blueprint of your team’s ideas and why you think it may work. Monday is a great tool to share these visual inspirations and collaborate in real-time. After everything is sent over, work through this feedback with your design team.
Hold regular learning sessions
It would be helpful for your teams to meet regularly to discuss brand updates, new UI/UX best practices, design concepts, team charters, and more. You can even dissect a competitor’s customer experience together to see what works or doesn’t for your product/service.
These educational brainstorming sessions will allow your design team to understand marketing’s vision and purpose, while marketing learns design’s processes and limitations. But you’ll all be united by the same end goal: attracting and delighting customers.
How to work with developers
Marketing is focused on executing campaigns, developers are focused on product rollouts. In a perfect world, these timelines would sync up, but realistically, marketing and dev teams aren’t always on the same page. To bridge this gap:
Ask questions to understand technical capabilities
Your dev team wants you to know what they’re technically capable of producing within your time constraints. They don’t want to over-promise and under-deliver.
So after you pitch your idea, ask them to explain what it will take to get from point A to point B. Don’t ever assume you know how the process will work just because you have this idea in your head or read an article about how it should work.
Have respect for their process and working methods, and you’ll know how to make collaboration smoother on your end. Using a tool like monday.com that seamlessly integrates with some of today’s most popular dev tools such as GitLab, GitHub, Jira, and PagerDuty is a great way to stay connected, stay collaborative, and keep both teams in the loop.
Clearly define problems but be wary of making assumptions
Let’s say your new product landing page is loading too slow and hurting your SEO. While you may have a few recommendations to fix this issue, never assume you know the best route.
Instead, it’s better to clearly define the issue, explain what a successful fix looks like, and leave your expert-level dev team to find the solution. Ask them to share why they think these issues might be happening and what they can do to improve the user experience.
How to work with customer support
Customer support is there when your prospects have questions and when your customers have issues. As a marketer, you should leverage the goldmine of insight your CS team has to make your job more effective. To collaborate here:
Learn patterns of complaints/successes
Complaint: The customer said the messaging on this landing page is conflicting with what they saw on our homepage. It needs to be updated.
Success: The customer really enjoyed their chatbot experience for getting support questions answered quickly and efficiently.
Schedule check-ins with your CS team to learn your complaints and successes, and you’ll be better equipped to attract prospects and keep customers. If you’re using a cloud-based call center, you’ll be able to keep track of this feedback in a single space. The same is true if you implement a live chat on your webiste.
This direct line of communication from your target audience can be used to strengthen what’s working and fix what’s hurting your KPIs.
How to work with leadership
Keep in touch with leadership during critical milestones, especially for long-term campaigns and projects. Don’t wait for them to ask for updates; proactively show them how marketing is contributing to the sales pipeline, leads, and ultimately, the business’ revenue.
Create and use marketing dashboards to give leadership an in-depth look at your performance. These visuals will display marketing analytics, KPIs, and other metrics vital to your measure of success. Reports also help translate marketing jargon (SEO, CPC, etc.) into easily digestible graphs.
Once you share your results, leaders will have a chance to weigh in with ideas or suggestions. Keeping track of these metrics on your monday.com boards also allows leadership to check in more frequently with results and leave feedback asynchronously.
A word on remote cross-team collaboration
Many of the challenges of remote cross-team collaboration wouldn’t be quite so challenging if some bigger picture things are addressed. Of course, the challenge arises when team members are physically separated—whatever silos existed in the office tend to become fortified in a WFH setting.
The solution? Improve cross-team collaboration with monday.com Work OS. monday.com is a flexible solution with building blocks that bring together marketing teams—or any group of people with project goals, really— and their skill sets to create custom workflows for problem-solving and meeting key performance indicators.
Unlike most traditional collaboration tools, monday.com Work OS isn’t just for team leaders or specific departments and functions. Cross-functional collaboration becomes a breeze with:
- Real-time updates and notifications
- Multi-level permissions
- Owner and due date columns
- Tagging
Cross-functional projects and reporting are seamless with customizable dashboards, too. You can even facilitate team-building with workspaces dedicated to online events and activities.
It’s time to collaborate better
They say teamwork makes the dream work, and with these tips in your toolbelt, you have everything you need for marketing cross-collaboration greatness.
On top of scheduling routine check-ins with each department and understanding their unique processes, working out of a centralized project management platform keeps everyone on the same page when it comes to project tracking and communication.
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