Sales and Marketing 1:1 Meeting Template

One-on-one (1:1) meetings are an important platform for developing trust and rapport between sales and marketing leaders. These periodic meetings are aimed at ensuring initial and ongoing alignment between the sales and marketing teams around goals, tactics, expectations, strategy, and performance. They’re also a chance for leaders to engage in a personal dialogue, and understand individual strengths and weaknesses to best guide and motivate team members, and keep them focused on sales results.

Occurring on a regular weekly or bi-weekly cadence, 1:1 sales and marketing meetings most often occur between sales and marketing leaders, commonly the department head of marketing and sales, or VP/Director of marketing and VP/Director of sales. In other cases, organizations will assign and align a leader from each department to be responsible for these regular check-in meetings. 

At Fellow we know a good agenda is the best tool to make sure meetings are on track and productive, so we’re sharing a sales and marketing 1:1 template – curated by LinkedIn – to help your department leads have better meetings, which in turn ensure positive sales and marketing results from your team members. 

What’s inside this Sales and Marketing 1:1 Meeting Template:

1 Strategy Spotlight

The first segment of a good sales and marketing 1:1 meeting is spent discussing the relevant sales and marketing strategies, often from an account-based perspective. Aligning on strategies that serve the goals of both the sales and marketing teams will ensure buy-in from both teams and instill confidence that the teams are truly being treated as allies and partners when it comes to achieving organizational goals.  

2 SLA Performance

The second phase of a successful sales and marketing 1:1 should be spent reviewing SLA performance. Maintaining alignment on Service Level Agreements (SLA), the commitments set out between marketing and sales needed to achieve common goals, are the backbone of sales and marketing success. Your organization’s SLAs are essentially a touchstone keeping both teams focused on their common goal(s), to ensure effective delivery of services to your clients. 

Because of their importance, SLAs should be reviewed at least once during each sales and marketing 1:1 meeting. Not only does this help teams stay focused and on track, it also helps each team come up with relevant action items necessary for continued sales and marketing success.

3 Content, Campaign, and Competition Review

The third portion of your sales and marketing 1:1 meeting is spent reviewing and discussing sales and marketing content, campaigns and competition. During this time the marketing leader should share details about any current, ongoing or upcoming campaigns, specifically outlining how each campaign can serve and support the sales team. 

The marketing leader should highlight content and offers that are performing well, so sales knows which messaging and tactics to prioritize in their prospect outreach and nurturing. Similarly, the sales lead should share feedback on the content and offers that are resonating with customers or falling flat so the marketing team can adjust or pivot campaigns and content as needed. 

This is also a great opportunity for the sales leader to share insights on current and potential competition. 

4 Buyer Engagement and Trends

The final segment of your sales and marketing 1:1 meeting is dedicated to discussing and reviewing buyer engagement and trends. During this time, the sales lead should provide insights on the customer engagement and marketing trends their team is seeing, whereas the marketing lead should provide details that stems from their team’s research into trending topics that can support conversations with prospective buyers. The marketing team should also highlight the storyline within the marketing content that is being used to generate leads or attract early-stage prospects so that the sales team can effectively continue conversations where the marketing team leaves off as buyers move through the sales funnel. 

Drive alignment between Marketing and Sales teams

The goals of a sales and marketing 1:1 meeting is to define and align the goals, strategy and services for the sales and marketing teams, as well as set agendas for future key meetings that incorporate the entirety of each department. 

In order to ensure all accomplishments, joint projects or efforts, viewpoints and concerns for both departments are discussed, the sales and marketing leads should work together to define a clear agenda prior to each sales and marketing 1:1. Each sales and marketing 1:1 agenda should consistently cover relevant themes or categories that pertain to both teams.

Adopting regular sales and marketing 1:1 meetings will help align your departments from a high-level perspective, however, in order to make the most of your sales and marketing 1:1 meetings, we recommend also incorporating daily stand-up meetings between the entire marketing and sales team in order to maintain alignment throughout the week, complimenting the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of sales cycles and marketing trends. Not only will regular stand-ups ensure on-going alignment between the teams, but also helps to keep those who aren’t the team leads in the loop as to what was discussed during each weekly or bi-weekly sales and marketing 1:1.