If you’re the kind of marketing team that works alongside a sales team, here’s probably the absolute best thing you can do to have a cozy working relationship.

If you want to be a better marketer and run a better marketing team, there’s one easy thing you can do to make that happen: talk to your sales team.

That sounds ridiculously obvious, but here’s why this approach is a little different.

Yes, have informal conversations with them whenever you need to, but you’ve got to be really intentional about having formal, premeditated, planned out conversations with them.

The reason you want to do this? It’s a phenomenal channel for gaining intel on what your customers are thinking, and what’s the sentiment in the market. You can’t get this data by studying Google Analytics charts.

Another great reason, the sales team is chock full of excellent ideas, and usually no one wants to listen to them, but now you do, and they’ll love you for it.

To be clear, this feedback isn’t designed to put marketing in the role of “order takers”. Instead, us marketers have to take all of this feedback, summarize, think on it, and read between the lines to get at the juiciest most actionable nuggets, and communicate back what you’re acting on and what you’re not, and the rationale. 

Here’s how to do it.

Come up with 3-4 questions you want to ask, questions that will get you market intel that your sales team will have unique insight into.

EXAMPLES

What’s the most common objection you’re hearing right now from buyers?

What features do customers seem to be gravitating towards right now?

With rising interest rates, how are buyers feeling about their purchasing power?

Once you’ve got your questions, speak to each sales person one-on-one by booking time on their calendar, and share the questions ahead of time so they’ll know what to expect.

Document the answers you get, summarize them, create new action items, and share the results.

How often do you need to do this? Start by speaking to each rep every 3 months, and adjust from there.