Marketing

How your marketing team can complement the sales guys, and help them sell more.

6 Mins read

Marriage, ubiquitous amongst all cultures around the globe, is a perfect testament of the basic human need of feeling a sense of love, warmth, and belonging.

Sales and marketing guys are no exception to these innate needs too (no matter how soulless their personal lives seem to be given the severely caffeine-packed, meal-skipped, sleep-deprived and target-bound pressure cooker of a professional schedule they have). And there is much to be learned from the institution of marriage when it comes to breaking the silos that mar the sales and marketing departments. For what else can teach us best that when two parties have in tune temperaments, joint goals and a thorough understanding of what the other one wants; the efficiency of efforts multiplies, and the volume of output amplifies!

Both marketing and sales are “outward looking” departments; these teams seldom twiddle their thumbs and are always aggressively working on acquiring customers and driving revenue. Still, an organization’s C – level’s business projections and revenue growth are most often not at par with the combined efforts put in by both the departments.

Why no movement when everyone is rowing the same boat?

 

Marketing Team with Sales Guys

The common sense of direction is probably amiss!

Being a marketing person, I’d for long thought sales folks to be myopic – too focused on their monthly targets, with little regard for the long-term negative branding implications of the huge discounts they throw just to achieve the numbers.

A couple of smoke sessions with our sales team tell me that the work of marketing team isn’t held in a high regard either – we’re thought to be of out of touch with how things work on ground level, and most of the projects we invest our time in, help them little in driving in the dollars.

The problem? Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from A DIFFERENT GALAXY ALL-TOGETHER!

The two teams have their roles and goals differently aligned. Marketing seems to be a highbrow, innovative and long-term oriented act; while sales – immediate output driven and short-term – they just want to know how marketing can help them TODAY. Here are some tips for the sales team that they should adopt to produce good results.

What a deadly combination and perfect balance would it be if both these activities come together and be completely in sync?

How can marketing team help sales bring more revenue?

To begin with:

See the world with sales team’s eyes

The first step is to get on the same page as your sales team. To begin with, question yourself how you define these two farther-end milestones of a customer acquisition cycle.

  1. What’s a lead?
    For marketing team, any data they gather from a campaign is a lead. Sales guys don’t share the sentiment. For them, the excel sheets or dashboards passed on from campaigns are garbage pools of email IDs and phone numbers they’ve to get their hands dirty in to identify a few valuable leads. These they painstakingly nurture into prospects, who might then overtime become actual customers. So, what’s a lead?
  2. What’s a closure?
    Marketing guys often think that their job is done once they create enough mindshare for the product in the market and increase the number of inquiries. For sales team, an inquiry or a lead is just the beginning of a very long cycle of – bringing to ground the high expectations from the product that customer carries (Thanks to the exaggerated picture painted by the marketing campaign!), identifying the actual needs of the customer, hitting the pain point, and then if a competitor doesn’t pop up at the very last minute with a severely discounted rate; possibly make a sale.

When the end purpose of any and all of sales and marketing activities is one – revenue, it makes logical sense that the intermittent elements be defined the same. When both teams are on the same page from the very beginning of the customer acquisition cycle – as to what constitutes a lead, and what a closure is – then the end result, revenue, will be much better.

Equip sales team with everything they need to “pull the trigger”

In a recent discussion where I asked ZNetLive’s Sales head on what expectations he has from the marketing department, he fashioned himself as “James Bond”, the protagonist of the Bond film series.

“Marketing department is the ‘MI6’ agency, and I’m the point man ‘James Bond’. Every time I go on a mission, I need everything setup down to the last detail by my agency; I should just have to do the “one-to-one” combat to capture each prospect, convince them with my proposition and pull the trigger – convert them into loyal clients,” he said.

Marketing Team Can Complement The Sales Guys

Indeed. Before a prospective customer shows up on your sales team’s door:

  • Paint the rosiest picture of your company. Ooze credibility, establish yourself as the best in your field. Make him feel a sense of entitlement, and more importantly, peace of mind in associating with you.
  • Showcase a solid-most product. Don’t make your sales team do the heavy-lifting. Use your website, or other means of communication to make customer know as much as possible about your product – features, FAQs, competitor analysis, and even post-sale queries – before he gets in touch with your sales team.
  • Turn up the word-of-mouth volume: Have existing customers who can speak the best for you and your products? Get those testimonials and positive reviews in action so that your prospects start to feel at home.
  • Keep your sales team ready to greet the customers: What all does your sales team need to be able to instantly close the deal? Readily mail-able a) case studies of existing customers or corporate clients, b) in-depth feature PPTs or PDFs of the product, c) company brochures d) instant discounts and e) any and all other information material they might need, should be at their disposal.

Don’t make the sales guys dig well for the water every day

We at ZNetLive, frequently reach out to school and college communities, for these students will in future possibly become entrepreneurs and might be our customers. Our sales team cannot wrap their heads around the utility of this activity, and see its connection with IMMEDIATE revenue, and how it can help them close more numbers TODAY.

Many of the marketing team’s projects are long-haul driven, and their results too are expected after a certain time-frame. Sales team hence have to rely on up-selling and cross-selling to existing customers for reaching their monthly targets.

The takeaway for marketing is to plan their activities so as to always keep the existing revenue ongoing. Always do:

  • Pre-emptive planning: Have a tête-à-tête with the sales team early on, know their revenue targets of the month and identify if you’re able to pass on to them sufficient leads. Is there a healthy enough funnel for this month?
  • Disaster management: If many of the initial inquiries don’t materialize, and there is a sudden “lead crunch” or disruption of the expected revenue inflow in the middle of the month, what’s your backup strategy? What impromptu campaigns can you execute to get things running instantly?

Jump in the pool; no one learned swimming by watching YouTube videos

Sales team always know better than marketing guys as to which product features fly and which die for one simple reason – they interact with customers daily, something the latter rarely do.

Get on sales call and chats

To improve the efficiency of your marketing campaigns, it is vital to understand the nerve of your customer, and for that – get on sales calls and chats.

Talk to them – understand their needs, figure out how they search for a provider, identify how they choose between you and your competitor, know what they expect from your product, and then apply all these learnings retrospectively when you design a new marketing campaign.

This will help you pass on to sales team- highly relevant inquiries and get higher lead to conversion ratio.

alex “Marketing is all about knowing your audience, and taking sales calls allows you to get to know them first hand. after a week of taking the occasional call, I felt like i knew our clients personally and that i could better target their needs in our initial online touches.”

Alex Avrich,
Director of Marketing,
CHASH Scavenger Hunts

Atomize the marketing campaigns with sales team’s insights

Keep the sales guys involved when you draft your marketing campaigns. They are cued to the ground realities, and can help you understand what in your campaign will work and what won’t.

Very small learnings passed on by the sales team – such as what should be the subject of your email campaign, which product features should be on top at website, which existing customer reviews will resonate best with the target market, what would be the right time to roll a discount, when is the right moment to float free trials – have been of great value to me in increasing the outcome of marketing projects.

Services ZNetLive offer:

Domain Names India

Shared Hosting India

WordPress Hosting India

VPS Hosting India

Dedicated Server India

Bottom-line: Communication and coordination

Marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin; with several organizations also resorting to “smarketing” – i.e., having a unified team for both. The key to success lies in marketing department working in tandem with sales, assessing their needs, and aligning their activities accordingly.

For how much can a 007 achieve if M doesn’t get the target details right, Moneypenny fails to pass on the right information, and Q makes gadgets that are of little utility on field?

2 posts

About author
Leading the marketing division at ZNetLive, Dakshesh likes to devise ambitious projects to meet the organization’s revenue goals. His deep knowledge of Indian IT & Cloud industry helps him frame innovative marketing strategies that haven’t been explored before, & making successful result-driven marketing campaigns. You can reach him on Linkedin.
Articles
Related posts
BusinessManagementMarketing

LeadSquared vs Zoho - Which is the best CRM for small businesses?

4 Mins read
Did you know, the global customer relationship management (CRM) software market is forecast to grow to USD 57 billion in 2025*? This…
ManagementMarketing

Top 10 HubSpot CRM Benefits in 2023

4 Mins read
In the modern business landscape, everything is so fast-paced and interconnected that organizations face a myriad of challenges like diverse customer needs,…
ManagementMarketing

What is HubSpot CRM and why you should choose it?

6 Mins read
In the fast-paced competitive world of business, customer relationships are the lifeblood that sustains an organization’s growth and prosperity. Customers have become…