How to integrate your cannabis business’ sales and marketing teams

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When a cannabis company removes barriers between sales and marketing teams, results will improve. Research has shown that integrating sales and marketing leads to increased revenue, higher return on investment per prospect, improved focus and performance, greater efficiency, and reduced frustration.

And these are just some of the reasons why integrating sales and marketing is essential to the success of the cannabis business! The reality is, when companies integrate sales and marketing, the positive impact will be far-reaching.

5 steps to integrating sales and marketing

Integrating sales and marketing teams and functions is a multi-step, ongoing process that begins at the executive and strategic levels. Below are five key steps to integrating your cannabis sales and marketing teams to improve results.

1. Get leadership buy-in

Everything starts at the top. If your organization’s leaders don’t believe the importance of sales and marketing integration, they won’t model the behaviors needed to persuade employees to join it.

Therefore, first ensure that all leaders fully understand the benefits of the integration and support the implementation. This could require changes in priorities, budgets, staffing and even corporate culture to ensure the integration is comprehensive and sustainable.

2. Develop a revenue roadmap and common key performance indicators

For sales and marketing teams to be integrated, they must share goals and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that accompany those goals. Instead of thinking of sales and marketing in separate silos, see them as a single team on a mission to grow sales. With this mindset, you can create a joint sales strategy plan instead of a marketing strategy plan and a separate sales strategy plan.

The strategic planning process should also include lead definitions. What defines a cold, warm or hot line? What are Marketing Qualified Leads versus Sales Qualified Leads? Everyone needs to understand and agree to these definitions, as well as common goals and KPIs, or the integration of sales and marketing will not work optimally.

3. Create systems and processes to achieve common goals

To ensure that all leads are followed up correctly and in a timely manner and none are lost, common systems and processes should be in place to achieve common sales and marketing goals. For example, a process should be in place to move leads from marketing to sales (or back to marketing) at the right time. Likewise, processes should be in place to ensure sales reps have access to the marketing content and materials needed for different types of sales leads.

For integrated processes to work, sales and marketing team members must have access to the right tools and systems to communicate effectively, share assets, exchange data, and so on. All the necessary systems should be developed and tools configured in advance so that team members can work as efficiently as possible on a daily basis. In other words, nobody should waste time looking for data or asking for access to documents.

4. Open communication and keep it open

Open and transparent communication is crucial for the integration of sales and marketing. Using collaboration and communication tools like Slack, Trello, or Asana can make a significant difference in how people access and share information. In addition, weekly meetings should not be missing. These meetings give everyone a chance to make sure they’re on the same page and hold everyone accountable for meeting their deadlines. Every team member should participate, including leaders.

Also, create a feedback loop between sales and marketing regarding potential customers’ needs, problems, pain points, experiences, etc. All of this information is essential to creating buyer personas and customer profiles that can be used to target more (and better) potential customers. Because the sales team speaks directly to customers, they have valuable information about those needs, issues, etc. that should be shared with the marketing team.

Likewise, lead engagement information should be shared with both marketing and sales. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to track all interactions with each lead. This includes marketing engagement (e.g. email campaigns sent, campaigns opened, links clicked, etc.) and sales engagement (e.g. results of sales pitches or personal email messages, information collected through them individual communications about prospects have been obtained, and soon). All of this information can help both teams achieve better results – but only if the information is shared.

5. Train team members

When onboarding sales and marketing team members at all levels of the organization, they need to be fully trained on how the integrated sales and marketing team works. This includes explaining the joint revenue roadmap, lead definitions, lead handoff process, KPIs, systems, processes, tools, updating the CRM with lead information and more.

Without all this information, lines of communication will break down. The barriers between sales and marketing teams are rising again, and results will suffer. It is up to leaders to ensure that these two teams remain aligned so that the company continues to achieve the best possible results from their efforts.

Key insights to integrate your sales and marketing teams for your cannabis business

The advantages of integrating sales and marketing teams far outweigh the disadvantages. So, the sooner you can integrate these two teams, the sooner your cannabis business will see better results.

If you need a CRM to connect with cannabis and hemp license holders in the US, Canada, and international markets so your sales and marketing teams can track, qualify, and convert leads throughout the buyer journey, schedule a Cannabiz demo Media License Database.