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With the move to social gaining speed every day, the business world is seeing a benefit in unifying sales and marketing. From Facebook commerce to social lead generation, this is quickly becoming a necessity for any business growing as quickly as internet technology is.

Business2Community suggests, “By playing nice together, an organization can increase qualified leads, reduce their cost per lead, increase sales efficiency and ultimately increase their overall ROI.”

While social CRM software was the start of this social sales movement, it’s time that your teams get together for the good of your business and your customer. Consider the three ways in which these teams can improve as a unit.

Basic Communication: Getting On the Same Page

Getting these two important teams on the same page starts with something as simple as communication. Marketing speaks the language of engagement and relations, while sales is focused on the sales process and what that entails. Starting with communication ensures that the rest will fall into place correctly.

• Speak the same language: Sales says prospect, lead, and quality whereas marketing may use similar terms with different definitions. Start by ensuring all employees are on the same page so no mistakes are made in the lead qualifying and buying process.

Audience: Finding the Right One

The sales team engages their customer in one way: talking about the product, the price and the options they have for buying. However, the marketing team is focused on, not who the person is, but their lifestyle, what their struggles are, etc.

And, experts over at Salesandmarketing.com iterate this: “Read the average marketing brief for a product launch or extension and words like ‘sophisticated,’ ‘upbeat’ and ‘modern’ are usually used to describe the target customer.” In order to make this unification work, both teams need to be catering to same, singular customer.

• One seamless target: Before the teams can start working together there needs to be a seamless customer profile. This will allow marketing to engage with and convert the customers that the sales team is trying to sell.

The Message: Keep it Consistent

Finally, the most important reason to unify these two departments is to ensure that you’re portraying a consistent message across the board. From sales to social media outlets, you want your customers or potential customers getting the same message.

• Developing marketing materials: Marketing materials – from brochures to email campaigns - are put out to gain new customers, so you want to be sure you’re targeting the same person sales is. Thus, when the transaction is transferred from one department to the other, there is no confusion.

Sales and marketing are integral to any business success and now is the time to merge them into a single lead building powerhouse.

Bio: Jessica Sanders is an avid small business writer. As the marketing copyeditor of Resource Nation, she touches on a range of topics such as email marketing and direct mail.