Macaroni and cheese. Gin and tonic. Hugs and kisses. Sales and marketing. All of these things are made for one another. Writing this, we know that there are a couple of sales and marketing teams who struggle to sit at the same table. We're here to unite these two departs, get them to break bread and sky rocket your business to new heights.
The end goal of this article is to align marketing and sales by focusing both parties on the most important aspect: the customer. It's been proven time and time again that the better you can align your sales and marketing teams, the more likely you are to delight a prospect - and delighted prospects grow into returning customers and clients.
Let's hit the ground running and explore the advantages of both sales and marketing to your organisation.
Sales is ultimately critical to your company's bottom line. Fact: you cannot have scalable growth without an impressive sales team. At its most basic, your sales team's goal is to first qualify prospects, reach out and build relationships with them, and ultimately, provide a solution that will benefit the prospect. When done well, a sales transaction results in a sale, a satisfied customer, and revenue for your company.
This team must be dedicate themselves to concrete the positive outcome of your customers and clients. They need to place themselves in the shoes of their leads and prospects and visualise their why, and demonstrate how your product or service is a solution — the best solution — to those problems.
On the other side of the coin, marketing is all about igniting interest in potential consumers, spreading the news of your amazing solutions all over the show. Marketing uses both emotion and analytics to reach an audience, and convert curious viewers into qualified leads.
Before we dive into the buyer's building blocks, we need to come to terms with one thing: your buyer has unlimited information at their fingertips. Social media, articles, websites and the product and service reviews of previous buyers will influence them even before you've had a chance to send a sales rep running after them.
We've found that the biggest decision module out there is the review system. When a prospect who has already read thirteen customer reviews gets in touch with your sales rep, they're going to require a different conversation than a prospect who's only heard of your company from a Facebook ad.
That is why your marketing and sales teams need to be in tight alignment — because your buyer needs to be communicated with, and sold to, wherever and whenever they want. The traditional sales and marketing tactics no longer work - we are rewriting the 2021 marketing playbook.
To find scalable growth, it's of utmost importance that your marketing team communicate all the information they have about a prospect to your sales team before a salesperson even gets on the phone. This is a fundamental step in any inbound marketing strategy.
To truly delight your customer, it's critical you reduce friction by implementing a strategy to align your sales and marketing teams. For instance, you might have your sales and marketing teams work together to craft a buyer persona, or document content gaps along a buyer's journey. While it might seem like the two teams have different measurements of success, they should ultimately share the goal of being customer-centric, even at the cost of their individual processes.
Collaboration is a great way to have each department see and acknowledge the other's needs. Given both departments' different dealings with customers, clients and prospects, it'd be a great idea to have the two teams sit down and flesh out your ideal buyer persona. Your marketers have a keen knowledge of your consumer's psyche and have conducted hours of research.
Nine out of ten times, your star marketing team haven't spoken directly to these prospects. These insights can only be obtained from your sales team.
Ultimately, to get a full picture of your consumer, it's critical that each team help craft the buyer persona. Marketing can create an initial buyer persona through research and brainstorming sessions -- but then you gather input from sales to modify and refine that persona.
Getting initial input from salespeople, as well as asking for final approval on a buyer persona, is critical to ensure each team is working together with the same consumer in mind.
Your sales and marketing teams should take the time to compile everything both teams have created to help solve for the customer. Members from each team should have a candid discussion about what's missing. Maybe a sales rep notices your marketing team hasn't created any e-books on certain pain points along the buyer's journey. On the other side of the coin, maybe your marketing team needs your sales team to provide input to craft a more useful customer case study.
Additionally, both teams should take the time to organise and understand what content works best for which stage of the buyer's journey. While likely a tedious process, this will help both teams become more effective in their strategies over the long-term.
Nowadays, this is one of the most critical strategies you need to implement. It eliminates friction for the customer, and it also helps your sales reps close more deals.
For instance, consider how you'd feel if you spoke with a sales rep for the first time, and he already knew where you worked, how long you'd been there, which email newsletters you'd subscribed to, and which company networking events you'd attended. You'd likely be more impressed than if you spoke to a sales rep who'd never heard of you before, right?
It's vital you find a way to keep track of each interaction your customer has with your company — a free CRM is incredibly useful for this.
Let's face it. The marketing department thinks that success can be measured in YouTube views, click-through rates and lower the CPCs while the sales team measures victory in, well, sales. A common ground between all of this needs to be found, and etched out to become an overall measurement of what success should look like.
When a marketer emails a prospect, they should consider the person on the other end – and whether they want to receive that email, and how that email could solve their problems - that's what all of this about in the end, right?
On top of that, when a sales rep makes a call they need to keep in mind that the conversation isn't about making a sale — it's about solving a problem for a prospect.
With this in mind, your teams will have an easier time blurring the lines between their individual tasks and responsibilities, and recognising their very unified desire to solve for the customer, even over their own processes.