In September 2018, Hurricane Florence was barreling towards the Carolinas at 125 miles per hour. Onlookers anxiously monitored the storm that Gov. Roy Cooper described as “historic and maybe once in a lifetime.” 

All told, it would end up taking 53 lives and costing over $24 billion in damages. 

A day before it made landfall, the marketing department at AlertMedia, a mass emergency notification software, got a call. A business leader in North Carolina was worried about the impending storm and his team lacked a reliable way to communicate with employees during an emergency. 

Could AlertMedia help? 

According to AlertMedia, it’s a familiar story. Companies, nonprofit organizations and government entities are often unprepared when it comes to emergency response and communication, and that lack of planning can be devastating: An estimated 25 percent of businesses don’t open again after a major disaster, according to the Institute for Business and Home Safety.

“A lot of companies have only ever known email, group text and phone trees,” said Amber Williams, a senior account executive at AlertMedia. “It’s always enlightening to ask them if they update their contact information frequently. When people leave the company or recently join, there can be a communication breakdown. This really gets people thinking.”

Andrew Allen, director of demand generation, said that the customer in North Carolina signed up for AlertMedia within three hours of the call and began using the system that day. When Hurricane Florence arrived, the North Carolina company was able to quickly communicate information to their entire team via push notification, text messages, calls, email and more, as well as utilize features like two-way communication. 

When it mattered most, everyone was able to stay connected. 

“Most software companies have siloed internal departments and complex onboarding processes,” Allen said. “But AlertMedia’s marketing and sales teams collaborate on all initiatives. Combined with a simple setup process, that allows us to focus on solving our customers’ immediate communication needs.”

So, how do they work together? According to employees, the sales and marketing teams work hand in hand to provide emergency solutions to their customers — and do it fast since every second counts. They say it’s a relationship that’s an anomaly in any industry. 

“I have friends in sales, and when I tell them how our sales and marketing teams work together, they are blown away by it,” said Madison Phillips, a senior account executive. “There really aren’t a lot of companies doing what we’re doing. A lot of other organizations could benefit from having that kind of relationship.”

AlertMedia says that this emphasis on collaboration has created a supportive work culture that champions teamwork, camaraderie and a spirit of togetherness that allows them to best prepare their customers for the moments that matter most.

Phillips works on the monitoring team, covering AlertMedia’s lone worker solution, which helps keep individuals safe when traveling or working alone.

As a senior account executive selling AlertMedia’s emergency communication software, Williams helps all types of organizations communicate quickly and reliably during critical events. 

Allen oversees a team of marketers who share content and run marketing campaigns designed to engage prospective companies about how AlertMedia can help them better communicate during emergencies. His team ultimately hands those warm leads off to the sales team to further explore a potential fit.

Andrew, how exactly does the sales team help with your team’s efforts?

Allen: We interact often, asking, “What questions are you hearing? What are the terms and phrases that these customers are using, and how do they want to use our products?” That feedback helps the marketing team create assets that speak the same language as the companies we hope to serve. 

This type of real-time and instantaneous feedback and adjustment isn’t common but is only possible because the two teams are so collaborative.

Madison and Amber, how does marketing help your team? 

Phillips: In my experience at other companies, it’s usually set up so sales and marketing are two different departments that don’t speak. Usually, it’s one against the other when it comes to leads, but here we really are all in this together. Marketing does a lot for us behind the scenes. In fact, most of our pipeline comes from marketing. They start conversations with leads, so nothing’s really cold for us. I think that is so unique in a company — I’ve always had to do everything cold — and it’s surely a better experience for prospective customers.

Williams: A big part of my job is to empower a buyer to socialize the value of AlertMedia to their other internal stakeholders. Our marketing team creates assets that allow our prospects to clearly see the value our software delivers and to share that value in a consumable format across their organization.

What happens after a marketing lead is passed off to sales?

Allen: The salesperson here owns the entire buyer journey, only handing off the relationship to customer success once a prospect becomes a customer. At other companies, there are so many people involved because the product is complicated and the process is complicated — and that’s just a bad experience for someone that is trying to buy from you. That doesn’t really exist here by design.

Phillips: Once we receive the lead, we immediately call the interested company. We get complimented all of the time for reaching out so quickly. That’s one of our biggest strengths: being able to respond quickly, armed with the relevant context from the marketing team to help guide those conversations and make it valuable to the customer right off the bat.

Camaraderie is nice, but does it translate into the teams hitting their goals?

Allen: Absolutely, because we plan everything out accordingly. We see the revenue goals for the year and the sales team has their own individual goals. On the marketing team, we have to do the math against those goals: If the sales cycle is this long and the average deal is this big, how many opportunities do we need to create from that? So we plan backward from that, which tells us how many opportunities we need to create every quarter for the sales team to be able to hit their goals.

It sounds like a good system for the customers, but what’s enticing about it for the rest of AlertMedia? 

Allen: We have a company-wide bonus plan: Everybody in the company gets a bonus based on the revenue goals that the sales team is hitting. So everyone’s incentivized. We want to give sales good leads, people that are interested in discussing how AlertMedia can help them communicate. The product team wants to build products that the sales team can easily sell. The customer success team wants to make the customers happy so they come back. Everyone is unified and we’re rowing in the same direction.

Williams: I do think that’s unique in an organization like this. Everyone here is really encouraged to see everyone succeed. No one’s leaving you off on your own to figure out — you have a whole system in place behind you to help you learn the product quickly and get you up and running.

Since everyone puts our customers first, it’s not a negatively competitive nature here — you don’t feel like it’s cutthroat, but rather you feel like everybody really enjoys each other and wants to see everyone succeed. I think maybe that might be the most competitive thing here at AlertMedia is whose dog is the cutest.