Video Transcript

If you’re an organization that has already conducted marketing research, you are well on your way to sharing out insights and making your organization better. But let’s talk about how can you share insights throughout your organization in a meaningful way? This is often where we see businesses start to stumble. We see data, research, projects start to live only inside the walls of marketing, not shared out with the broader organization. That doesn’t do your business any good. So let’s talk about some ways to overcome this. Again, every time you share out your research insights, you have more legs for that insight outside your department, which means greater ROI and greater buy-in.

First, you might consider collaborating with sales. We do sometimes see marketing departments who don’t always collaborate with their sales compatriots or even with other departments. And so this is a muscle that you’re going to want to exercise and it will take time and maybe multiple reps, but you will get there.

So let’s talk about what that can look like. With your sales department, you want to sit down and assess the situation and align on where are their joint understandings and where their gaps. Then you need to document the differences and where your project can help fit in the most. So let’s take an example. If you’re in the B2B facility management space, you might offer services that are janitorial cleaning products, security services, or even product-oriented like first aid kits and supply mats. You might start talking with sales and realize you’ve seen the market trend of environmental care and concern when it comes to cleaning products and the ecological impacts. So you might talk with sales and say certain organizations like our customers over here or our prospects over here fit this criteria and we want to make sure we’re talking about these cares and concerns with them.

So you want to develop a messaging matrix that highlights certain cares or certain products and services that you offer that will resonate with those prospects and with those customers. Having that messaging matrix live within your sales team is incredibly important, so your insights don’t get stuck in the department of marketing. Let’s talk about a second way that you can collaborate with other teams. Let’s talk about product. Going back to our B2B example. If you offer all of these different services, but maybe you don’t have a solution that meets those environmental concerns or regulatory pressures that your customers face, you might come to your product team and say, Hey, I think we need to fix this. Is this something we can offer? Do we already have products that maybe meet these needs, but we’re not talking about how they meet these needs? If you have a cleaning product that already meets regulation, but maybe you don’t speak about it in that way, that is something that you’re going to want to bring to your sales team.

If you want to talk to product, you might want to actually consider offering a brand new package of services. Getting with your product team will allow you to stay agile in the marketplace because you will sense the market trends and the feedback from your customers. It’s like having your ear to the pulse. It will allow you to continue to move quickly while meeting your needs.

Those are just a few ways that you can collaborate across the organization. Always ensure that you assess and align and really kick off that collaboration and then document it so it lives after that conversation. Once you do those things, you’ll start working that muscle of collaboration and you can do this not only for research but with your other marketing projects.

Continue to do that and you will start seeing your organization flourish because of the research that your team is conducting, and that’s a win for your team as well.