The collaboration between sales and marketing creates demand generation. While marketing may attract leads, sales retain and nurture them. The effort of aligning these two avenues will allow businesses to have a better chance at success. If you are a business that has been neglecting to combine sales and marketing, now is the time to imagine the possibilities.
As a marketing agency, it is important to keep our marketing and sales teams working together. The next steps detail how we achieve this.
- Communication
Consistent communication around business goals and sales initiatives allows the marketing team to provide the sales team with the most relevant content, research, and industry data. This allows sales to have relevant conversations and more effectively advance deals with prospective clients. Overall, maintaining this common vision/mission creates a cohesive team all around.
With weekly cross-functional meetings with both our marketing and sales teams and consistently communicating through platforms such as Slack and monday.com, we are able to effectively align our sales and marketing dynamics. This helps us avoid silos and collaborate more efficiently, allowing us more time to be creative and produce quality work.
This allows our brand to stay consistent across all channels, whether it be the target audience that our sales team is talking to or the content our marketing team is distributing—everything is the same.
- Have common goals
Because we know that one is not achieved without the other, our marketing and sales goals are always aligned, and keeping them aligned is our objective when we are strategizing future goals and plans. The days of sales and marketing plans being two separate conversations is over.
In order to have success with sales, all of our content marketing needs to back up our conversations with prospective clients. And in order for our sales team to know how to talk about our brand, we have to provide clear and concise messaging, voice, and branding.
To further expand on this idea, marketing helps sales by:
- Educating prospective clients about your product or service.
- Providing influence and brand awareness.
- Engaging the target audience.
Likewise, sales helps marketing by:
- Identifying the ideal customer.
- Proving thought leadership.
- Content validity.
- Real-world application and customer experience.
There is always a strategy in mind that gears our marketing to add value and bring success to our sales efforts. While these separate teams may have smaller, individual goals, overall we need to collaborate to succeed.
- Building reputation
As was just briefly touched on, creating valuable content marketing allows us to showcase that we are thought leaders in the industry. This helps sales efforts tremendously when making new connections. When we do more than just say that we are something but back it up with our marketing actions, we are more likely to find success.
Increased brand awareness also leads us to better networking opportunities and, thus, more partnerships. Trusted referrals come from having a well-established and consistent brand reputation. Our sales and marketing teams work cohesively to increase brand awareness and build a positive brand reputation.
The combination of marketing and sales strategies is a recipe for building trust. It is the portrayal of not only what we say, but how we say it, what our actions are, and so on.
- Forward thinking
Staying on top of new things introduced in the industry is key for us to achieve our sales and marketing goals. The metaverse, for example, is an opportunity in AR/VR/NFTs and advertising for brands. This will be important when moving forward with marketing and in turn, sales-driven goals.
Marketing is constantly evolving and we have to stay up to date with what is new and exciting. That way we not only create content with the newest information but also build relationships with other industry leaders by discussing these topics through our sales efforts.
With that in mind, our business development plan always includes remaining adaptable and constantly learning. Having the ability to predict and plan for the future is key when keeping both the marketing and sales visions aligned.
If you are ready to take your digital marketing to the next level, contact our CEO at veronika@jumpstart-now.com for more information. You can also schedule a free consultation here.
