Healing the Healer: How Advocacy Helped Bridge the Sales and Marketing Divide.
Overview
Bravo Wellness offers configurable and results-driven employee wellness programs. They specialize in programs that inspire personal improvement, reduce healthcare costs, and attract and retain top talent.
Josh Taylor, Marketing Director, originally approached MASONKELLY with a marketing need for very specific content marketing surrounding lead generation and conference marketing.
We were hired to build great content. To succeed, we needed to address the real problem: their sales and marketing relationship. Though this wasn’t on the scope of work, it was the essential activity that allowed us to ensure that all the deliverables that were on the scope got done.
The Problem
As MASONKELLY proceeded with our discovery process, we realized through our conversations with Bravo’s marketing and sales teams that they were not working together as effectively as they could be.
It is commonplace for teams to become siloed within an organization. As they become caught up in their own hectic work pace, they easily forget that all departments are on the same team. Add dominant personalities, healthy egos and conflicting behavioral styles to the mix, and you can easily see how quickly sales and marketing teams lose focus of each other. In Bravo’s case, this issue was definitely the crux of the matter.
We also found that marketing team stood tall when developing brand messaging and customer wellness communications. But when it came to being an engine to fuel sales— lead generation, event marketing and social media— the organization and its sales team lacked confidence in their marketers.
Extensive experience across several industries has given Kimberley eagle eyes to spot riffs between a company’s marketing and sales teams. For her, this problem does not really represent a red flag because MASONKELLY is adept at solving these types of process problems and team functionality issues that are typically disguised as marketing issues. In this case, the real issue wasn’t marketing — it was team confidence, and Kimberley spotted it almost immediately.
So, although Bravo initially asked for a content specialist, MASONKELLY realized they needed a senior-level person, a strategist like Kimberley Kelly who could partner with Bravo’s director of marketing to design programs, project manage campaigns and work between their sales and marketing teams to bridge the divide.
The beauty of hiring a boutique firm like ours? We have authoritative experts who can quickly adapt to evolving situations to provide expertise in many areas. Not only can we work multiple areas of marketing, we can also provide much-needed strategy and project management. – Kimberley Kelly, Managing Principal
Solution
MASONKELLY is adept at bridging the sales-marketing divide to enable those teams to work together more effectively. In conversations with the marketing director, we advocated for and reiterated the importance of listening to the sales organization.
We taught Bravo the benefits of recognizing the sales team as both a marketing channel and as a client.
Kimberley showed Bravo’s marketers how to create a more formal role between the sales and marketing teams to achieve goals together.
Marketing began treating sales as a client; serving them as a partner; supporting them with their pipeline goals.
Sales learned how to ask for what it needed in clear terms – no fluff.
The marketing team developed scope agreements for the sales team to ensure clear understanding and expectations.
The marketing team gave presentations of their frameworks for upcoming campaigns. This built the sales team’s confidence that they would get needed support their intimate involvement which would take away from sales activities.
Our solution didn’t stop there.
We worked side by side with both teams to deliver four big achievements:
A demand generation campaign was one of MASONKELLY’s most successful strategies in this engagement. To build momentum at the top of the funnel, we designed a complex direct mail kit, web, and email marketing campaign.
A new CEO-to-CEO communication was birthed: The Bravo Briefing. Beyond your typical company newsletter, we worked across the company to bring about a communication piece it desperately wanted. Partnering with the compliance, c-suite, and marketing organization, we built a communication piece that became a conversation with Bravo’s customers and true quarterly briefing to communicate industry thought leadership in a peer-to-peer format. It’s a hit to this day!
Bravo’s promotional efforts for trade shows and webinars were reimagined. We developed a framework that would allow the marketing team to drive on-ground conference engagement using email marketing, social media and contests. In one example, the framework supported a 2.5-day conference and ran daily promotional emails, giving away conference bling like iPads and Fitbits — all done virtually.
Our comprehensive digital content strategy addressed long-standing Bravo operational issues surrounding their go-to form of communication: written marketing content. We advised Bravo on the benefits of moving to video content.
Result
In this very complicated, large engagement, Bravo’s sales and marketing teams began seeing that great things could happen as a result of their new relationship with each other – all within the short span of six months.
The demand generation campaign effort re-introduced Bravo to specific target clients. Two members of the sales team attributed $300,000 in new pipeline activity from the campaign.
The recommendation to shift content from written message to video has paid off big as well. The company’s LinkedIn followers have tripled because of the rich video messaging.
The sales team thought MASONKELLY was so effective, they not only demanded we come back, but they funded us out of their own budget to handle several high-dollar trade shows the next year. And that made the marketing director really happy!
“Thank you for helping us build our sales team’s confidence.”
Samatha Veek
VP Product Marketing
Bravo Wellness
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