9 December 2016

5 ways to sales and marketing success

Learn how to improve your sales and marketing with these 5 ways to success.  

1. Involve Sales People in the Marketing Strategy Ideation Processes

Although marketers might try to deny it, it’s true:

Sales people hold the key to reaching out and engaging your potential users. 

By including input from the sales people in the marketing strategy sessions, you can:

• Help marketers improve their output, by allowing them to work with real customer feedback
• Incorporate sales people in the development strategies that ultimately aim to deliver the most powerful asset they work with - leads.

2. Share Promotional Calendar with the Sales Team

We bet that a lot of the time, your sales people aren’t even aware of the offers marketers use to convert visitors into leads. 

Heck, they probably don’t know which specific lead magnet grabbed a person’s attention and got them on your list.

As a result, they follow up using generic messaging, greatly missing out on the opportunity to engage leads with relevant information. 

To overcome this, create a common promotion strategy calendar and share it with both teams to help sales people tie their responses to the actual offer a person’s downloaded.

3. Get the Sales People to Publish on your Blog

Tell us:

What’s the one thing EVERY sales person needs?

(Well, apart from more leads and closed sales, of course.)

It’s building their authority, and being perceived as an expert. 

And what’s the easiest way to do it?

You got it - content. 

The more you post, the more leads you can acquire.

So, get your sales team to publish on the blog. 

This will bring mutual benefits for both teams:

• Marketing will get more content to publish to the site, and use to attract leads.
• Sales people, on the other hand, will get a chance to promote their knowledge and build assets they could use when interacting with prospects.

TIP: If your sales people don’t feel confident to write the content themselves, hire a ghostwriter (or even better, get the marketing team to ghost for them) to convert the person’s ideas into actionable content.

4. Invite the Marketing Team to Listen to Sales Calls

Get your marketers to sit in with the sales guys during their calls. Make it clear that they don’t have to participate, just listen. 

This will help your marketing team gain a much better insight into your potential customers’ minds, and in turn, create more relevant and engaging content. 

It’s that simple.

5. Create a Sales Enablement Resource Database

Just like sales hold the key to customer insight, marketers are in control of materials the sales team needs to engage the future users.

Marketers work tirelessly creating various content types, article, eBooks, tutorials, and much more. 

The problem? Sales people often don’t even know where to look for it. 

In fact, according to CMO Council, sales people use only about 30% of the materials marketers create.

A solution? Implement a content management process that would allow categorising of all marketing assets so that everyone in the organisation could use them.