5 Ways Marketing Can Support Your Sales Team
Your sales and marketing departments are both working toward the same goal — attracting leads, converting them into customers, and bringing in revenue. Historically, however, despite this alignment these two departments have operated independently of each other.
Typically, the marketing department generates leads and then hands them off to the sales department for nurturing and closing, but that process doesn’t have to be a clean break. Marketers bring a substantial skillset to the table, and it’s a waste of their talents to limit them to simply bringing in leads.
Rather than siloing your departments, asking marketing to generate leads and attention and then asking sales to “go out and sell,” consider how your marketing department or agency can assist your sales team.
1. Define Your Ideal Customer
Crafting buyer personas and customer journeys are jobs generally left to the marketing department, but the sales team should have a say in them, too.
You might find that the marketing team is bringing in the wrong kind of person — they have a need that your organization can meet, but they consistently balk at the price once the sales team is close to closing. If that’s the case, the sales team needs to be able to tell the marketing team to target higher-budget clients.
The same process applies to defining the buyer’s journey. Creating a buyer’s journey involves a lot of assumptions about how customers interact with your brand, how long it takes them to reach a decision, and in what order they do so. If your sales team is showing data that indicate that your assumptions are off-target, it’s time to make better ones.
2. Create Sales Collateral
Your marketing team is already well-versed in making convincing materials that reflect your brand colors, logo, voice, and tone. They know how to focus on the right selling points and differentiators. Take advantage of the talent that your marketing team is already using and create high-quality case studies, whitepapers, proposals, and presentations that can help your sales teams close sales and convert leads.
3. Set Up Remarketing Campaigns
When you set up your website to bring in leads, you should also be using a pixel tracker to run remarketing tracking on your website. Once the infrastructure is in place, you can have your sales teams generate unique quotes and proposals and host each of them on a unique URL providing a custom experience for potential customers.
Remarketing campaigns can offer enormous value, especially at the bottom of the sales funnel where people are on the verge of making a purchase decision. By targeting people who have already visited your site, downloaded a whitepaper, or checked your pricing, you can tailor your messaging to encourage them to make the next step in the purchase process.
4. Collect Data
Your marketing team is already collecting a wealth of data — how many people click on an ad or open an email, how many people read a blog, how long they stay on the page, where they go next, and so on. Sales teams can benefit from this enormous collection of data and the techniques used to find it to start generating their own data.
With sales techniques becoming increasingly digitized, the marketing team can assist the sales team by tracking, analyzing, and sharing valuable customer data points.. Dig into how certain pieces of collateral are received, whether leads are more likely to close through email or phone, the ideal length of a conversation, and any other data that start to show useful patterns.
5. Follow Up
Finally, the most important thing to remember is that both sales and marketing departments will work better with more complete data. The sales team should come away from their sales calls, with actionable insights from their experience that can inform the way they approach future customers. Sales can share those insights with the marketing team to enhance their efforts and drive more qualified leads.
The process of sharing insights may take a while to establish, so it is important to keep testing, iterating, and tracking. The ultimate goal is to have open communication between departments during the crucial stages of the sales cycle to ensure each team is supporting the other effectively.”,”_content”:”field_60183f9050f0b”},”mode”:”edit”} /–>