It’s possible that you see your business as a collection of different parts that all play their own role toward the common goal of growing your business. If that’s the case, you might think something like this:
Marketing = brand
Sales = money
Right?
Wrong.
Think of it this way:
Brand = relationships
Sales = relationships
If your internal business strategy divides your marketing and sales departments, then you’re probably not seeing the ROI you were counting on. If this is the case, you may need to redesign your internal work structure to align sales and marketing – or invest in a solid sales and marketing tech stack that bridges the gap between them for you.
“In the past three years the lines between marketing and sales have become even more blurred, especially with the increase of remote sales due to the pandemic. Now it’s time for sales and marketing leaders to bridge the gap between these two functions so that both can work to their fullest potential.” – Delma Lara, Marketing Director, Hyperio
In this article we’ll cover:
- How are sales and marketing naturally aligned?
- Why it should matter (a lot!) whether you have integrated sales and marketing strategies.
- How sales engagement helps both sales and marketing?
- What is the fastest way to align sales and marketing?
Why is marketing so important to sales?
Your brand is your profile. Your value proposition is your bio. Your outreach methods are your conversation skills. The first live phone connection your sales reps make is basically your first date.
You wouldn’t sell yourself short on your personal account – so don’t do it with your brand persona, either.
Your ability to nurture a customer, to convert leads into buyers, begins with your brand.
It matters to customers how easy it is to find, recognize, engage with and purchase your products, and the quickest way to accomplish this is to embed these things very clearly in your brand and marketing strategies.
When you see that little smirk on a cardboard box, you don’t need to ask who they are or what they do, and you already know how convenient it is to buy something from them. They’ve already embedded those details into their brand.
A good brand = more inbound leads. People will do their research and purchase online if you make it easy enough for them. Which means your sales reps have more time to focus on the big fish and target their multichannel outbound outreach to decision makers that are harder to convert.
How are sales and marketing naturally aligned?
Think of sales and marketing in the same way you think of the chicken and the egg – they rely on each other in the endless loop of a sales lifecycle, and you can’t have success in one without the success of the other.
The purpose of both is to build relationships with your customers to reach the same goal: the success of the business.
In order to achieve the levels of success you want for your company to grow, you need customers to have a positive relationship with your brand and reps.
If you’re investing in a really good AI software, you also need to program your inhuman helpers (website and landing page chatbots) to cultivate great relationships with customers that have brought themselves to your doorstep to ask you questions about your company or product. They’re qualifying themselves for you – and giving you great details about their buying commitment in the process – so you need to have a system in place that takes AI software, brand, and sales into consideration from the start – not as an afterthought.
This means you need to have all your internal systems working toward one thing: developing customer relevant content and marketing it effectively.
How does sales engagement help both sales and marketing?
In order to generate relevant content, you need to know where your customers are doing their research on their product and why.
What is the pain point that your target audience is trying to fix – and how do you market your product in a way that will immediately tell the customer that you can fix it.
This is called a personalized message, and it’s crucial to your success.
In order to do this, you need software or staff who are going to be analyzing your target audience’s interactions with products in the market.
If you have a system in place that tracks customer data from marketing to sale, then you can flag how hot a lead is and fine-tune your personalized messaging to convert.
Better yet, if you have software at your fingertips that can track, store and analyze data, then you not only win more sales with your current batch of leads, but you have the power to make predictive assessments concerning future converts, too. You lighten the sales reps’ workload by decreasing the people-hours they need to dedicate to researching leads, and you have more success in marketing the next batch of prospects.
Sales engagement technology is designed to help your human staff get more work done with less burn-out and more efficiency. Sales engagement is developed to help you engage with customers in a way that leads them gently into the sales funnel. Read more about the different sales platforms here.
What’s the fastest way to align sales and marketing?
Your best bet is some good technology.
What if we told you that you could automatically prospect over ten thousand cold leads at once with event-triggered data that consistently delivers the hottest leads to the top of your sales outreach workflow?
Powered by AI intelligence using both structured and unstructured data, Hyperio identifies which targets to work first and how to hook them with real-time trigger-based marketing.
You don’t have to take our word for it. You can book your appointment in our calendar today and get started on your 30-day free trial. We’ll even send you a personalized demo to see how our software can help you to integrate your sales and marketing, boost your ROI, and help you satisfy your customers. 😎
