Your sales and marketing teams should be like husband and wife. It’s a marriage and both departments should be working toward the same goal of a healthy bottom line for your company.
If these departments aren’t operating in harmony with clear lines of communication, your club is missing a lot of opportunity.
There should be constant communication between your sales and marketing leaders. First, there must be a clear goal and understanding from each department of their expected lead generation. For example, will marketing generate 65 percent of the total leads each month and sales generate 35 percent, or will it be 50/50?
Have meetings, meetings and more meetings. After you develop the sales/marketing plan together, the two team leaders should meet at the end of the month to review what happened that month. If you fell short of your goal, why and how do you fix it for next month? Don’t point the blame on one department or the other. You are a team. You should review your plan and go over how each department will get the amount of leads needed. If you find there is a need to add to your plan to get more leads, work together to figure out the best way to bring in those leads that are needed.
You should meet (or do a conference call) at the beginning of the week to see where you are with your plan. Is the plan working and bringing in the amount of leads you need or do you have to tweak it? This is where the importance of working together comes into play. If one department is falling short on lead generation the other department may come up with ideas on how they can pick up the slack for that month.
Create a monthly meeting with your sales and marketing teams as a whole. Encourage healthy feedback between the two departments. Your marketing department is not often able to be in your clubs or in the communities around your clubs if you are a multi-chain operator, so marketing needs to hear from the teams in the clubs what is working and what is not.
Develop an easy and accurate lead tracking system in your sales CRM, and make sure the sales team understands the importance of accurate tracking. Marketing needs to know what is driving traffic through the club’s doors so they can adjust their plan to help the sales team. Once the sales department understands how important this information is to their success, they will be more likely to tighten up on the way they track leads.
If you have the right team members, your sales and marketing should be a well-oiled machine.
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Donyel Cerceo is the director of marketing for Merritt Athletic Clubs. She can be reached at dcerceo@merrittclubs.com.
aligning sales & marketing efforts can be a strategic advantage. good article, would love to see follow up to this article