Do your marketing and sales teams speak the same language? As healthcare digital marketing techniques like content marketing and social media marketing become increasingly important business prerogatives, many companies are discovering that a disconnect between their marketing and sales teams is making it difficult to target the right customers. Consider the following findings from a 2012 Accenture Interactive CMO survey:

• 4 out of 10 marketers say they do not have the right people, tools and resources to meet their marketing objectives.
  
  
• 2 out of 3 marketers know that social media is important, but less than half feel confident with their strategy.
  
  
• 7 out of 10 marketers expect marketing to fundamentally change in the next five years.

The pressure is on. Healthcare marketing departments face an onslaught of competing business priorities. With higher customer demands and shrinking customer wallet space, the stakes have never been higher. Agile, timely and relevant digital marketing is critical for making a real-time impact with customers. At the same time, healthcare businesses are increasingly struggling to not only know what their customers want, but also to find creative and original ways to deliver this information and connect with these customers. Is your business facing a similar Catch-22 with its healthcare digital marketing?

As the front line for customer interaction, your sales team is a critical part of your marketing team – and vice versa. While most company’s sales and marketing departments toss insults at one another – “Marketing doesn’t send us enough leads!” or “Sales can never close the deal!” – your company’s two teams need each other more than ever. Here’s how to better connect your sales and marketing teams:

Use the Sales Team to Generate Better Leads.

When marketing and sales work in unison, your company will be able to generate better leads; it’s that simple. Sales is on the front line, conversing with potential customers each day. The sales team is uniquely position to know your customers’ pain points, what they want (and what they don’t), and how to best help them. Don’t let your marketing department fly blind! Sharing these insights is critical to developing a better digital marketing outreach strategy. After all, your marketing department could easily be generating hundreds of leads each week, but if none of these leads are actually qualified, then all that hard work is for naught, and the marketing team will end up wasting the sales team’s time.

Use the Marketing Team to Close More Deals.

Yes, just like using sales to generate more leads, using marketing to close more deals also sounds counterintuitive at first. But bear with us. Great digital marketing is key to nurturing your leads and closing the deal. After all, only three out of every 10 leads are actually “sales-ready” when first generated, according to Marketing Sherpa. Failure to nurture these leads means that your healthcare company could be throwing away 70% of its business. These longer-term opportunities are worth nurturing, and digital marketing strategies like content marketing and social media are some of the best ways to do so. Increasingly, prospective customers need to encounter at least three pieces of content before engaging with a company, according to Act-On. What does this mean for your healthcare business? It means that everything from the company blog to your LinkedIn account really do matter. The content your marketing department creates for these digital channels is key to nurturing leads and, ultimately, making it easy for your team to close the deal.

Bottom line:

As we transition away from traditional advertising in favor of healthcare digital marketing, the sales department and marketing department are no longer separate divisions living in their own silos. Increasingly, businesses must think of their sales team as part of their marketing team – and vice versa. Doing so is critical to maximizing marketing expenditures and reducing customer acquisition cost.