Marketing and sales teams each have a lot of expertise that they bring to the table. Although there is some overlap in their respective fields, each team member has unique perspectives and ideas on how to find leads, convert them, and increase revenue.
Today’s business environment requires a close alignment between these two teams. When each team is siloed off on their own, the lack of collaboration is apparent through things like:
- Duplicated efforts
- Inconsistent or misaligned messaging
- Missed opportunities for effective retargeting
- Wasted spending on under-performing marketing and sales strategies
- Lack of unified metrics for evaluating goals, strategies, and success
- Limited feedback data
- Confusion for prospects who receive inconsistent information from marketing and sales
These are some significant issues. In contrast, integrating sales and marketing gives you benefits like these:
- A singular and consistent brand voice across the entire company
- Increased efficiency
- Improved lead quality, thanks to improved collaboration
- Faster sales cycles
- Higher conversion rates
- Increased revenue
- Better utilization of CRM data
- Unified metrics
- Clear delineation of tasks to prevent redundancies
One way to start making these improvements is to cross-train your marketing team with data from your sales team. This can give your marketing pros easier access to insights that can help them create better and more compelling content.
Sales Insights that Strengthen Your Marketing Efforts
What are the most important pieces of information to use when you are integrating sales and marketing?
Sales data related to best-selling products and services
When your marketing team understands which products and services are the easiest to sell, they can market them far more effectively.
Customer demographics
The more information you can provide to the marketing team about the basic demographic profiles of your customers, the better. When your marketing team knows the age, gender, location, and firmographic data (such as industry, company size, and job title), their buyer personas can be more accurate.
Customer psychographics
If your sales team uses psychographic data to understand your customers’ interests, values, behaviors, and attitudes, be sure your marketing team gets this information – and appropriate cross-training to interpret it.
Common customer objections
Overcoming customer objections is usually associated with the sales team, but marketing can do a lot of pre-positioning on behalf of the sales team. Keep your marketing team updated on what objections the sales team hears – it will give them more opportunities to craft content that addresses those objections and softens the prospects’ position.
Lead source performance metrics
With good insights into what is working, marketing can double down on the channels with the highest conversion rates. Based on analyzing the sales data, marketing should also look to improve or optimize underperforming lead sources. This may involve adjustments to messaging, offers, and lead nurturing for specific channels.
Upsell/cross-sell data
What experiences does the sales team have when upselling or cross-selling products and services? This information is valuable to marketers, who can pair things together and create lead-nurturing content that directs customers from one service to another.
Cogo & Co. Can Help You with Integrating Sales and Marketing
When you align your sales and marketing teams through shared data, insights, and collaboration, the payoffs are immediately noticeable – and significant.
It takes effort and commitment, but it’s certainly worth it. At Cogo & Co., we have supported numerous companies as they have gone through this alignment process, which involves cross-training initiatives and intentional collaboration. No one has ever regretted putting in the work.
When you equip your marketing team with sales insights, they generate more qualified leads and prepare prospects for easier conversion by the sales team.
To explore how to bridge the gap between these two teams, talk to our experts here at Cogo & Co. Our data-driven team is ready to provide real solutions. Don’t leave money on the table due to a misalignment of your hard-working sales and marketing professionals!
Contact Cogo & Co. today to take our growth readiness test. After you get your results, contact us for a free consultation to review your current strategies to find what’s working and what needs improvement.
