Sales and marketing teams have always been known to have a frayed relationship at best! But there are ample benefits to be found when the two departments put their heads together and work in sync. Here are just 4 ways sales and marketing teams work together:
1. Marketing Can Warm Up Leads For Sales
If you ask most salespeople what marketing is for, they would say it’s just a nudge in the right direction for leads. But this helps to underline how sales and marketing can work together.
The truth is, marketing can be much more than that. With input from the sales team, sales and marketing can devise a strategy to seamlessly transport the customer through the entire buying cycle, from awareness right down to finalising the sale.
Marketing can warm up the customer before allowing the sales team to take over to convert the warmed up lead into a customer, making the sales team’s job much easier and increasing the number of leads converted.
2. Sales Can Help Marketing Better Understand The Customer
The salespeople spend all their time interacting with the customer, learning what challenges they face and what they want out of your products/services. Therefore, the sales team can give a unique insight into what makes the customer tick from first-hand experience.
Using this information, marketers can then create more tailored strategies that target these issues and show how your company can solve them. By targeting their main wants/needs and offering solutions to their challenges at this early stage, you will find more leads are generated through marketing’s efforts.
3. Marketing Can Nurture Cold Leads
It’s in the sales team’s nature to go for the easiest targets. The hotter prospects are going to make quicker, simpler sales and help reach targets. But what happens to the more reluctant leads who require a little more time and effort to convert them?
Again, this shows how sales and marketing can work together. With marketing’s help, those cold leads don’t have to get pushed aside and left to start looking to competitors for solutions. A specialised prospect nurturing campaign can be put in place by marketers that will ensure cold leads don’t slip away so easily and more conversions can be made.
4. Sales Can Give Feedback On Marketing Efforts
It’s often difficult for marketers to truly gauge just how well-received their marketing messages are. For example, a salesperson at a company once said that they struggled to reach prospects with follow-up emails because the company’s email had been blocked. This was due to receiving too many irrelevant marketing emails, which annoyed the prospects!
With feedback like this being passed back to the marketing team, they can rectify serious issues like this. It’s also important for sales to pass back any other general feedback on how the prospects are receiving the marketing messages to help marketers improve their efforts. If the prospect likes the marketing efforts, they will be much more warmed up and open to making a sale when they meet the sales team, so it’s beneficial all around.
If you are looking to improve your sales knowledge and skills, why not find out more about Oxford College of Marketing’s range of ISM Courses for sales professionals. Get your two-week free trial by contacting them or completing the form on their website.
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Posted here with permission from our 2019 National Sales Conference Sponsors, Oxford College of Marketing.
