Pt 4: Does Your Sales Team Have What They Need To Close?
This article is the fourth in a five-part series entitled?Is Your Marketing Working??Missed the intro? Start?here .
If you're like most businesses and your success depends on your sales team, how can you make sure they have what they need to be effective? Since we know sales and marketing can't live in silos, what should sales be empowered with to be successful?
A Clear Value Proposition
Tailored to each ideal customer profile, a strong value proposition should highlight the benefits of your products or services and clearly differentiate them from those of your competitors. Connect what you do to real (features) to actual customer problems (benefits) to provide a clear path to close. We create a competitive positioning guide for our clients that includes each competitors strong points, and how sales should respond to each of these objections in a way that reinforces value.
Quality Leads
If your sales team is chasing down uninterested or unqualified leads, they will feel demoralized and burn out quickly. Challenge marketing to use behavioral data from past marketing and sales activities to improve the inbound leads that are being delivered to sales. Map out each touch point along the customer journey to identify what content and channels have played a role in delivering qualified leads and optimize those for future success.
Effective Marketing Materials
Give your sales team more than a "checking in" for following up on sales leads who are dragging to close. Case studies, proven outcomes, and published articles that are relevant to that lead's problems help to build trust and show investment in that clients success rather than simply asking repeatedly for a sale. These materials should be as visually appealing as your best deliverable and highlight the benefits of your products or services. Educate potential customers about your offering and address any objections they may have.
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Feedback Loop
What's working? What's not? If your sales team isn't reporting back what leads turned into sales, which didn't, new objections, and any other insights from speaking directly to prospects, your teams are missing out on the single most effective data insight. Direct prospect feedback on what makes them willing to buy at a late stage, and learning what questions they still have helps marketing get ahead of those objections by addressing them early in inbound content. Build in feedback loops for marketing and sales to report back and learn from one another to constantly optimize your funnel.
Data Insights
Determine what metrics are important across the sales cycle, including website data, campaign performance, CRM activity, content assets sent throughout the sales cycle, number of calls, and any other data points you have that played a role in making a sale. By understanding how the data you have impacts human behavior, it becomes actionable instead of just numbers.
The TL;DR? Communicate early and often, without ego, and a focus on optimization and learning. Curious teams that collect and analyze data in order to improve always win out over those who compete.
Need more help? I got you.
?? If you’re ready to work with an agency that makes you more money, matches your energy, challenges what's possible, and gets all fired up about your brand outcomes, let’s do it:?https://lnkd.in/eG56BF7C
I help lay brand foundations for growth | #1 creator for branding & positioning worldwide | Founder of Legend Letters & Healthy Brand Consulting, Podcast Host, Brand Strategist
1 年Marketers need to involve their sales teams - help them! I've seen so many siloed marketers and sales teams pointing fingers at each other. At the end of the day, both functions are trying to accomplish the same thing. Break down those barriers!