I get it, sales team, you’re frustrated.
You’re spending long hours at work desperately trying to close deals with under-qualified leads, thanks to your marketing team. To make matters worse, maybe your marketers are accusing you of not properly following up with leads, resulting in lost deals.
If that scenario sounds familiar, I’m here to tell you it’s all avoidable.
According to HubSpot’s State of Inbound Report, just 26% of businesses operate under a marketing and sales service level agreement. That percentage is way too low.
You are all a part of the same company, right? Everyone is trying to get to the bottom line and improve overall growth, right?
Then why are we competing with each other!
Now, I know what you’re thinking…
How are we supposed to know who is performing best and where we need help if we all work together?
Well, that’s where smarketing comes in!
Smarketing is the alignment between your sales and marketing teams, created through shared goals and executed through a collaborative strategy.
The better you are at smarketing, the lower your cost of customer acquisition will be. This means increased leads and more closed deals at a lower price. Here are a few facts every salesperson needs to keep top-of-mind when discussing marketing.
You need marketing to tell a story
No matter how great your product or service is, you should never rely on selling features alone. Creating a desire for your product helps bring more value and interest to your buyers. That’s where marketing steps in.
When you buy a car you will almost always have some sort of emotional connection tied with the one you choose. Before finalizing the deal, you need to be connected and know the product is right for you. Feelings and emotions that just can’t be felt from a salesperson’s persuasion alone. This holds true with any sale that’s not an impulse buy.
Things like blogs, testimonials, social media efforts, and videos are just a few of the many ways you can use marketing to help tell a story and increase emotional appeal — ultimately easing the sales process.
Marketing helps build trust
“Nobody likes to be sold, but everyone likes to buy.”
The old fashioned, high-pressure sales tactics no longer work. Even if you have won the sale, that doesn’t mean you’ve garnered a long-term relationship.
When was the last time you bought something from a company you didn’t trust? Odds are, most of your purchases feel comfortable because you trust a firm or brand.
Buyers want to conduct business with people they know, like, and trust. Lucky for you, you can get your prospects closer to these goals with help from your marketers! Present your marketing team with questions and objections that often arise from your conversations. As a result, marketers can develop content that addresses how your product/service will help serve these needs.
Marketing helps determine when a person is “sales-ready”
Your marketing team can use data and tactics to help determine which prospects are actually sales-ready. Instead of cold-calling 500 prospects, marketing can help strip out the “noise” and provide a clearer direction for the sales team. Out of those 500 prospects, marketing may identify 50 that could use a hard sales pitch, while the remaining 450 require further nurturing. The point is, sales can direct their time and efforts to those prospects who are actually interested. Monitoring behaviors like email opens and click-throughs, social media engagement, and downloads are all great tell-tale signs that a prospect may be sales-ready.
You need each other
Simply put, sales without marketing is difficult. Without marketing, you’d have to make up for lost ground — tackling the tasks of storytelling, being persuasive, and finding emotional appeal without the assets you really need! As a result, it’s a lot harder to grow the company and increase revenue without the support of marketing.
The bottom line is this: Marketing provides the roof over the sales force while they’re inside working hard to close deals and increase revenue. When used correctly, your marketers will help eliminate any outside noise and funnel quality leads to the sales team.
Proper alignment between the sales team and the prospect is what ultimately closes deals. What’s vital to remember is that the “sales team” is actually made up of both salespeople and marketers. After all, you serve the same function and should have the same goals.
Now that you have a better understanding of how these departments should align, gather your sales & marketing teams together to bury the hatchet and start fresh!
For more tips and insights like these, check out our blog or get in touch!
