How to get team buy-in for your marketing plan

Without buy-in from everyone involved in executing your marketing plan, you'll never be fully successful in implementing it. And I don’t just mean your marketing team here either. 

Marketing should never operate in a silo. Their activities impact sales, customer service, product development, product/service delivery and operations and more. Your marketing strategy needs to fit within the context of your business growth strategy and work in collaboration with each departmental strategy.

But how do you get buy-in from all these different people? Especially when you have people who are not at all familiar with how marketing actually works. 

Here are my top 5 tips…

1. ​Make sure everyone understands how all the customer-facing teams work together

​There should not be a moment in time when a prospect is handed over from marketing to sales. A prospect might interact with marketing and sales at the same time, and they might sway to one side and then back to the other. Likewise with customer service, as existing customers go on to buy other products they might need support from sales. 

A contact should never be “owned” by a department, and departments should support each other in pursuit of the end goal of delivering the best customer experience.

This can often mean reviewing your internal processes and systems to make sure that customers can easily be passed between departments, and receive consistent service and have a comfortable experience in the process.

2. ​Explain where every role fits

I’ve found that the people who are most disaffected with marketing are the ones who feel that it is utterly irrelevant to their job. 

So the answer is to make sure that everyone knows why your marketing plan is absolutely relevant to them.

For example:

• Explain to the sales team why marketing needs their input to create messages that will work for the audience they speak to day in, day out. 
• Explain to customer services the importance of onboarding and customer loyalty, where their role fits in the buying process and how marketing is aiming to support them.
• Explain to your product development team what customers need to see, hear and feel at different points in the buying process so that they understand why marketing has requested certain improvements.
• Explain to operations the importance of packaging and delivery from a customer experience perspective. Show them how tiny details can make a huge difference for the customer and therefore for your organisation’s bottom line.

A sure-fire way of getting people on board with marketing is to show them exactly how your marketing plan will make their job better, easier and/or more satisfying for them by delivering a better experience for their customers.

3. ​Use a common language

​Used badly, jargon can be the enemy of communication and can create division and suspicion between departments.

However, useful and meaningful jargon can bring people together and strengthen a feeling of “one team”. This can be achieved quite easily by teaching and encouraging the use of a simple common language.

4. ​Allow staff to share ideas without barriers

​Wherever possible, avoid creating a culture where only the marketing team can have marketing ideas. Just because someone is not an expert in a certain field, does not mean they can’t have a great idea about it. In fact, some of the most creative solutions come from a mindset that is unclouded by convention and the status quo.

Facilitating the sharing and discussion of ideas across teams can be a powerful way to gain new perspectives and inspire new ways of doing things.

5. ​Encourage accountability

​Another advantage of having a common language and framework that everyone understands is that it enables accountability. 

“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself” -Henry Ford.

Getting people who are reluctant to engage with marketing can be an overwhelming prospect. It can often feel like it’d just be easier to exclude them and get on with the job in isolation. However, there is so much to be gained from getting people on board that it is rarely of any benefit not to do so.

If you’d like help with this, then book your free clarity call today so we can create a strategy to successfully get your team on board with your marketing plan.