As Sales Become Marketing...

Sales and marketing are often at odds, which has always shocked me, much the way one would be surprised by a car's tires and engine being at odds. Sure, they have different immediate goals and perform different functions but they both do what they do best to further the goals of the entire vehicle.

As qualifying leads, digital analytics, content, social networks, etc. become more and more the way that brands sell, we not only have to move past a marketing/sales rivalry and begin to move toward a new model where the sales team must become the marketers, and the marketing team needs to treat sales as the client, not the business.

As soon as LinkedIn launched Navigator, it created a stable environment for social selling that is much more account based than marketing communications based. Rather than the one-to-many shotgun marketing that is typical of most brands, and even the much more precise than the one-to-psychographically-defined-few that Facebook affords marketers, social selling allows sales and thought leaders within a brand the ability to market directly to the companies, the positions and the actual person that they need to to make the sale.

Your brand website and social profiles may have dozens of case studies, sponsor monthly webinars, because you have few ways to filter that content toward specific customers, you have to cover all of the bases. But say you're a billing software company who does work for government organizations, hospitals, universities, etc., it's difficult to focus on what without turning off the others. With social selling, you can bundle all of your health care-related case studies, webinars, infographics, demos, etc., to create a content marketing plan focused ONLY on the 1-4 people at the hospital you're targeting. They don't have to wade through your government case studies or your higher ed testimonials, only the communications that talk about your successes, their challenges and your solutions for them can be served up on a silver platter.

This is where marketing becomes the communications agency for sales. It is rapidly becoming the job of social strategists, marketers and creatives to support each sales person as if they are a client, providing them with account, title, and industry specific content to support their direct communications with leads via LinkedIn Navigator as well as industry-focused materials to position sales as industry influencers and experts and to establish senior executives as thought leaders in the space.

Even smaller brands with marketing teams of one or a few can work directly with sales or leadership to create not just persona-based but laser-focused, person-based marketing materials.

This is a big change from trying to come up with a broad enough suite of marketing communications to appeal to a wide range of audiences but rather than to create micro-strategies for a couple of dozen or so specific people.

It's also necessary for sales to start thinking of their engagements with leads as marketing communications: why do they want to hear from me? what do they want to hear from me? what are their challenges that I can solve? what will work best; a webinar, a one sheet, a presentation?

If you're not familiar with how thought leadership, social media, social selling, personal branding and content marketing work together, here is a presentation I put together for the team at Skillsoft as we launched social selling training:

If you're curious how well established your personal brand is on LinkedIn, check out your Social Selling Index here.