Strengthening marketing begins with sales

In today’s hyper-competitive business climate, companies need to continuously refine their marketing strategies to ensure that internal resources are optimized and new business-development efforts are finely tuned. While business owners are usually on top of every detail of their new business efforts (i.e. how much are we spending to bring in new business this year), often the examination of the proper use of internal resources is lacking.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the often subpar relationship between internal marketing and sales departments. Countless times we see sales teams working on initiatives without the support of marketing, and marketing teams working on periphery projects without the support or interest of sales.
Study after study shows that companies that view marketing and sales as a symbiotic partnership working towards the same goals (revenue growth) far outpace their dated competitors who view the two functions as separate silos with separate objectives. To address this disconnect, business owners need to integrate their marketing team into their sales efforts whenever and wherever possible. While this sounds easy enough on the surface, let’s dig a little deeper and discuss four tangible ways to ensure this symbiosis occurs.
• Dive into the sales process headfirst. At TribalVision, we never start a marketing campaign without spending several days getting to know a company and interviewing the sales and management team. Consider having your in-house marketing team invest time in this type of intense inter-departmental discovery as well. Your marketing team should know your sales process as well as your salespeople if they are tasked with providing the tools, collateral and marketing tactics necessary to optimize lead conversion. As they evaluate the current sales processes and learn the nuances of capturing new business, they should pay close attention to the path a prospect takes from initial website inquiry to paying customer. Your marketing team should map out every potential sales touch point and uncover ways to strengthen your sales efforts. They should create simple, digestible, how-to manuals on every customer interaction, giving your sales team everything they need to generate the perfect quote, proposal, deliverable or support to a client.
• Provide structure to the sales and marketing conversation. Whenever we start an engagement with a new client, one of the first questions we always ask is, “How often do your marketing and sales teams communicate?” Typically, the answer is that they speak every day, but upon further digging we realize that speaking is one thing, but meeting in a structured fashion with clear, predetermined agendas is quite another.
The first step is to schedule a monthly meeting between your marketing and sales teams. If those meetings already happen, make sure you are distilling the meeting action items into clearly laid out next steps. There is nothing worse than attending a meeting with lots of great talk but no clear game plan for everyone to follow afterwards. Also, use these meetings as a way to build a unified sales and marketing calendar.
• Integrate your marketing and sales platforms. Similar to bridging the communication between both teams, the communication between your marketing and sales-technology platforms is also a must. Marketing automation using tools such as Hubspot or Marketo can really help establish consistent prospect touch points, and CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com and Zoho can be incredibly helpful for tracking and building meaningful customer relationships with your sales team. If your marketing and sales teams aren’t using these tools, start. If they already are, make sure they are feeding data into each other, closing the feedback loop and ensuring that marketing isn’t just operating on the periphery. • Measure what you market. Other than traditional marketing functions that include design and asset development, just about every marketing tactic can be tracked, measured, analyzed and improved upon. The Internet has made finely tuned, quant-driven marketing a reality. Knowing this, your marketing department should be measuring everything they market and should be sharing this information with your sales team.
Each month, the marketing department should be developing an executive summary for upper management and the sales team that contains a detailed update on the effectiveness of current campaigns, progress on predetermined Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and the health of other marketing metrics. The monthly marketing summary should analyze your return on marketing spend, your paid-media cost per point, your e-newsletter-open rates, your website-traffic sources, your average cost per click and many other useful metrics. And if your marketing and sales teams are really working as one unit, lead conversion metrics from the sales team should also be funneled from the CRM reports into the executive summary so that a holistic view of a lead from initial marketing source to sales team conversion is possible to track and analyze.
Lead generation and conversion is much more of a science now, so hold your marketing and sales teams accountable to quantify their efforts. •


Christopher Ciunci is CEO and founder of Providence-based TribalVision.

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