Whether there is one salesperson or 1,000 salespeople outfitting your front line, it’s important that they have the right tools to convert opportunities into sales and ensure your company’s success. Working with your salespeople to identify their needs and provide these tools is the most efficient way to ensure that a company’s sales interactions and marketing communications are consistent, relevant, and designed to drive the sales pipeline. Here are four ways you can bring your sales and marketing teams together and unite them to get the results you want.
Get input from your sales team
Eliminate any disconnect between your marketing and sales teams and get them talking. Salespeople can offer tremendous insight into customers, needs, and objectives, as well as your company’s competitive challenges. Ask your salespeople to brief your marketing team on elements that are most critical to customers or clients that they need to meet. Your salespeople should also notify your marketing team of changes that they see in customer demographics or dynamics, including “hot button” issues or emerging trends.
Make sure to arrange regular briefings and meetings so that your salespeople can share these insights on an ongoing basis. Feedback from the front lines is instrumental in helping your marketing team collect qualitative feedback to accompany any quantitative measurements that you may be using to understand your customers and market, such as website visits and keyword traffic, survey research, market research, and industry data.
With an ongoing collaboration between your sales and marketing teams and a combination of qualitative and quantitative insights, you can revise your sales and marketing messages, materials, and tools to coincide with current needs in the market and successfully engage your customer base.
Gather insight from the closing process
In complex B2B sales, marketing can only reach so far into the pipeline. Salespeople are critical for customer acquisition because they can have in-depth discussions and conduct needs assessments with customers, deliver presentations, recommend products and services, address objections, and ultimately negotiate terms, pricing, and delivery.
By working with sales to understand what transpires after the handoff of opportunities generated by your marketing efforts, marketers can develop collateral and additional sales tools that suit buyer needs at the end stages of the purchase process.
This can potentially streamline the closing process and eliminate some of the time and effort required by your salespeople. It can also allow them to work more efficiently and spend more time selling and pursuing their next opportunities. With added consistency and effectiveness from end-to-end in the buying process, your marketing can deliver more relevant information and be a more valuable asset in influencing the customer’s final decision to buy.
Make sure you have what they need
Your sales team requires a full suite of marketing materials and tools that convey a consistent look and message. Each time a salesperson makes contact with customers or clients, these tools must work to reinforce your company image and support the sales process.
For example, your salespeople may use letters, emails, business cards, brochures, PDFs, presentations or proposals, contracts, or printed and online forms; It’s essential that all of these materials are consistent with your company’s branding, including your logo, color scheme, and style guidelines, and especially with your overall brand values, messaging, and product value propositions.
Take the time to investigate and make a comprehensive list of the day-to-day “touch points” between your salespeople and customers. Review and analyze your current marketing materials and tools, and consider how they enable or facilitate those touch points. Determine what gaps you need to fill and what needs improvement. Then make the necessary changes or create the required resources and supply your sales team with the items they need to be successful.
Share the marketing data that sales doesn’t have
One of the biggest impacts of marketing is the collection of rich prospect data that can come from online or offline behaviors in relation to buying interest. You can identify patterns, tendencies, and trends in the data that provide valuable insights into your customers and their buying behavior, and, by sharing this information with your sales team, you can work together to improve your sales and marketing processes to streamline selling and maximize conversions.
Through effective collaboration, marketing and sales can work jointly to improve performance and share accountability for driving sales growth and revenues by embracing an integrated, end-to-end-process, from prospecting to the final close.
Need to Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams?
Check out our other blog posts to learn more about how you can streamline your sales process, organize your sales and marketing operations, and set goals and manage tasks to get your teams talking, collaborating, and driving better results. Start growing your business more efficiently and effectively with planning, collaboration, and CRM tools from PlanPlus Online.
