Strengthening the Link Between Sales and Marketing
Which is more important, sales or marketing? Answer: the customer.
Sales and marketing go together like peanut butter and jelly, bacon and eggs… or maybe cash and flow. Your sales efforts need your marketing program to generate leads; your marketing success relies on effective sales techniques to turn those leads into closes.
For marketers, the focus of either should not be on segmented turfs, but on the customer. That’s because both functions have one goal – to generate revenue – and this hidden treasure is ultimately stored within the customer’s pocketbook.
Let’s say you send out a Direct Mail letter for a high-end system. In your perfectly worded message, you tout benefit after benefit, promoting incredible value, with all sorts of triggers to get your prospect to act with urgency.
Even then, you’re not likely to get a phone call from someone who’s never used your company before and hear them ask, “I got your letter. Thanks. Could you schedule me an installation of two new systems for my house for later this week?”
Nope. Instead, you’ll get a call for an estimate – through which a sales rep presents solutions for the customer to choose, and nudges the lead to a close.
This is the case even as marketing does a lot of the legwork that sales used to do before content-rich websites helped researching prospects pre-qualify and educate themselves prior to the sales rep arriving at their door. Marketing can help shorten the sales cycle while increasing the chances (leads generated) for sales success.
Sales and marketing guide prospects into loyal customers, yet it typically takes multiple contacts to make this happen. So, they need to work together to move customers through the funnels. Two steps to better integrate sales and marketing: Train all staff on how to deliver your company messaging. And maintain a unified, current and accessible database that gives data about leads, prospects and customers.