That sales and marketing are related is widely known, but that doesn’t mean business leaders always leverage the power of each discipline to improve the other. Improving the integration of your sales and marketing efforts leads to better business results, and understanding what that entails is becoming more and more critical to businesses these days.
My colleague Arnie Amir, a sales guru, recently wrote an article on “Acquiring the Right Sales People.” In that article, among the many other golden nuggets of advice for hiring and retaining sales people who will be most effective for your business, Arnie says: “Gone are the days when companies can present their new sales people with just their product information, ask them to hit the ground running and expect them to grow their business.” He goes on to provide a blueprint to ensure that your sales people will be successful – and that blueprint includes aspects of your marketing program. Arnie is a brilliant sales leader, and it’s worth reaching out to him for a conversation. Email him directly for a complimentary consultation and a copy of the article, or visit his website to learn more about him.
Arnie’s advice is spot on. You cannot just expect someone who has sales or even industry experience to join your company and hit the ground running. We marketers work very diligently on documenting the value proposition and key differentiators of the company as well as defining the Customer Journey. A sales person who understands the customer journey from the perspective of their new company, and who has the talent to meet the prospect where they are in that journey and lead them through the remainder of the funnel is a platinum find. But that means the marketing team also has to have done its job in defining things as clearly and accurately as possible.
That means you need to have a solid marketing strategy that ties together all five elements of marketing: Product, Price, People, Place, and Promotion. As I have said for a long time, a cohesive marketing strategy is much more than just promoting the company and its products. And that means the information flows in both directions between the sales and marketing team(s). Very often smaller companies use a variety of agencies to provide specific marketing program elements – Digital Marketing, Website Development, Social Media, etc – because agencies tend to specialize. That makes a solid marketing strategy much more important.
You need a marketing program that supports the sales team at every point in the Customer Journey – and that means you may need to convey different aspects of your message at different times in the journey or even in different media. Not doing so in a strategic way could easily overwhelm prospects with information they are not yet ready too process. And that overwhelm may defeat even the best of sales people.
Want to know more about how to create a marketing strategy that supports your sales team? Set up a complimentary consultation with Foresight Performance today.
