Is Having A Sales Team Enough?

Heard the term “Marketing and Sales Alignment”?

It’s popular not because it’s fashionable to talk about. It is important and should be mandatory for all companies to follow.

There are some industries like the Construction industry, that don’t bother about having a marketing department. No intention of bringing down a community as a whole, but there are a lot of such organizations who are still working on old school models, getting their sales teams to run behind the prospects and get the deals closed.

With the digital transformation of your customers’ lives (personal and professional), you can’t escape your company to keep it solely brick and mortar. You need to digitize your sales processes, have a strong marketing team, and stop the marathon of pushing people to buy from you.

Marketing alone is nothing.

Similarly, the sales team alone is not that impactful.

30 years ago, it would have been absolutely fine just having your salespeople do the cold door-knocks, but now, NO!

This might sound like spending extra resources on beautifying what the Salespeople do. That is exactly not what it is.

As much as I’m a cheerleader for having exactly the same ultimate goal for the marketing team and the sales team, I also believe that the way to achieve that goal is different for both these teams. They need to support each other with insights and keep the boundaries a little blurred between them, so they can reach the same organizational goal together.

Here’s how the Marketing team can add value to your Sales team:

1. Provides nurturing resources

Creating content is a huge part of what your marketing team does. If they start working with the sales team, they’ll create better-targeted resources in the form of blog posts, social, PDF downloadable, videos, white papers, etc. These resources can be used by the sales team to educate their prospects and nudge them towards making the decision in their favor.

2. Sets the tone for the whole organization

The marketing team focuses on at least three channels, after identifying the ones where their audiences spend the most time. The messaging they use, the visuals they create – everything can be identified with a certain tone. It gradually becomes the tone of the organization. It could be a highly professional strict tone, casual tone using slang may be, a fun tone, or helpful tone, etc. Could be anything that fits the product the best. This adds an advantage to the sales team to understand and maintain the tone consistency for all their prospects.

3. Spread the word across various lead sources

There could be multiple sources from which your salespeople can get good leads. Marketing is a consistent effort where they have the ability to touch thousands and thousands of audience members at a time, in a consistent voice, with a consistent message, and generate interest. This then leads to qualified leads, eventually.

4. A better understanding of target personas

This is true that the salespeople get to interact with the prospects one-on-one and so they know them very well. But Marketing people do their own research, considering past behaviors, trends, competitor activities, and forecasting. If both these worlds are combined, the resultant understanding of the organization’s target audience will be much more specific, highly segmented, and simply on-point. This will be a great help for both the teams doing their own things every day.

5. A lead scoring system that accounts for Marketing responses as well as sales responses

As a continuation of the previous point, if we combine the different responses a lead gives to the marketing activities, and the sales activities, you can have a better scoring system built for marking your leads as important or a waste of time.

6. Higher problem-solving capabilities

Not saying that salespeople are any less creative, but they have a fixed kind of job that they do every day. Which is great, because consistency is what matters. However, in marketing, nothing is certain, and not much is a fixed job. Every day they have to figure out ways to stay relevant on various channels. This capability can work like magic if your sales team can lower their differences and start talking to their marketing peers to tackle unusual situations while working on the deals. They will add fresh perspectives to your important and/or difficult leads.

Let’s hear it from you! Have you tried bringing together your marketing team and the sales team in the same room?

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Originally published on?my personal blog.

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