What in your experience is the best way to improve collaboration between sales and marketing?

Theme or framework for marketing should be: Business Aligned Marketing 
Tenets:
1. Consider the 'Sales team' as an internal customer. This mindset shift helps look at their pain points or asks attentively. 
2. Set the expectations right and own the deliverables. Show them how many of their asks have been addressed. 
3. Be in the Gemba (workspace): Marketing should do field visits and take customer calls (the entire sales cycle, if possible). This will help the marketing team see areas of improvement. 
4. Mindset: I am here to help you achieve your goals. 
5. Trust & credits: During the early stages, sales teams should be made comfortable sharing feedback on MQLs - give them confidence that their sales incentives are their own. As the relationship matures, internal incentives can be worked out. Leaders, managers, and executives should be on the same page here.  

Who should make the move first? Marketing.

Over a period of time, I have seen sales teams becoming the true champions of marketing. 

The sales team needs to see marketing as an ally, using content and materials created by marketing as a way to improve communication with customers. There are sellers who are almost like "lone wolves", they are not willing to work with marketing in actions that would be incredible, often because they do not want to give access to the information and customers in their portfolio.

As many mention here in this topic as well, putting both the marketing and sales sectors aligned towards the same goals and keeping everyone constantly informed about the metrics is essential to unite the teams.

The marketing team also needs to be willing to listen to the sales team's needs and concerns and receive feedback on the materials and campaigns they are creating. This can help the marketing team adjust its approach to better meet the needs of the sales team as well as the customers.

To deal with this situation, it's important that the company's leadership makes it clear that collaboration between the sales and marketing teams is a basic requirement of their work. Encouraging collaboration through rewards and recognition for teamwork often works very well, as does making it clear that lack of collaboration can have negative consequences.

Money. As far as incentives go, especially with a sales team, money drives them. So offering up an incentive, or goals, to meet based on monetary gains, I would think that is the best way to get them to collaboratoe together.

Two things from me:
1. Psychological safety - improve this by showing vulnerability, asking for direction, increasing proximity, removing any judgement or managing feedback well
2. Talking results. How marketing projects have taken sales from x to y over a certain time period, and vice versa. Start with this and transition to talking about both as a 'team', and a collective.
Hope this helps!

I concur with others on here who have brought up leadership. Leadership can often want goals that conflict with marketing efforts. Such as, "we need to highlight product A." "Okay, that'll be the top of our marketing campaign." Then I hear, "we need to light up product B". "Okay, so what about Product A?" "We need to highlight both." "But that will detract spend contributions from one to the other. And on our homepage, we have room for just one first impression. Either you spend more or you understand prioritizing just one is more realistic." And that's where the disconnect happens. It can be quite frustrating, but leadership often will want goals and have expectations that aren't entirely compatible with each other - wanting it both ways. It's like, I have space on our homepage for just one first offer. One's the first, and then there's a second. You can't have two firsts. And then the communication disappears as they seemingly don't care. Then I ask questions without responses. Leadership, good leadership, can make such a difference and it's unfortunate that many do not have it. Because in the past, I've been told to shift focus to a different product, and have done so, and then been asked what about the other one? And it's like, no, you told me to shift focus, you can't have it both ways. And I think it's less about being educated and communication as it just being completely ignorant and not paying attention. Fun stuff.
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