Why Sales Teams Hold the Key to Effective Marketing Strategies

To a casual consumer, the terms “sales” and “marketing” are often used interchangeably. On one hand, this makes a lot of sense—both departments are, after all, working to sell your products or services to customers to generate income for your organization. However, those who work in either field know there are just as many differences in how these two departments function, as well as how they fill different needs within your organization. 

Marketing sets the stage for a sale to happen—in a very meaningful way. It’s all about how customers learn about a brand and how that reputation is maintained. Marketing sets plans into motion to engage with your current and prospective customers, raise your brand profile, and attract the right target audience of interested parties who will be most likely to make a purchase. Your marketing team is also responsible for communicating the benefits of your brand and then leveraging these benefits to educate and attract customers. In other words, it’s about the Four Ps:

• Product
• Price
• Place 
• Promotion

Sales, then, is all about gaining traction—using the groundwork your marketing team laid—to ensure a final transaction or sale happens. It involves a careful, personalized plan (often stocked with tools and resources) to turn interested prospects into active buyers, ultimately securing revenue for your brand.

While marketing is about creating and maintaining brand reputation, sales is about closing the deal on your organization’s goods and services to bring in revenue based on this information.

But make no mistake: Both roles are equally important to an organization’s success. Using a volleyball analogy, it’s the marketing team that comes in with the bump and set to keep the ball in the air and connect with target audiences and existing customers alike, all to ensure the sales team can spike the ball, therefore earning the entire team a point—or in this case, a sale. The marketing team warms up your target audience—through strategies like increasing brand recognition, creating engaging content, and sending targeted campaigns—so your salespeople are truly ready to make a sale to interested, eager customers.

Ultimately, your sales and marketing teams are after the same end goal: To bring in revenue through purchases of goods and/or services. This is why it can be so powerful to work together. The main difference is in the approach:

• Marketing connects to a whole range of users by creating conceptual ideal customers and research-backed target audiences. Then, this team crafts intentional strategies and processes to promote products and services, drive interest, and inspire engagement based on these concepts. 
• Sales focuses more on individual leads rather than an array of potential or hypothetical customers. They interact on a far more personal level, working to meet the needs of real clients and customers to meet sales goals. 

When sales and marketing teams align, everyone grows stronger:

• Salespeople can go beyond meeting demand for products and services—because they can help create this demand.
• Sales teams benefit from more transparency regarding everything that goes into marketing and have a better understanding of the correlation between advertising and marketing costs and real-life sales.
• Marketing teams can introduce new campaigns and release upcoming product/service announcements when sales teams feel prepared to make the most of them. 

Sales and marketing team alignment is also great for Account-Based Marketing (ABM), which is all about focusing on building personalized buying experiences for high-value clients and customers to build relationships, increase sales, and get better, more qualified clients. When you eliminate work silos and collaborate across teams, this can have all kinds of benefits for your organization, including: 

• Sales and marketing teams are working toward a shared goal
• All teams adhere to your established budget
• Everyone knows their roles and responsibilities

But it’s not just your internal teams that benefit from this kind of “cross training;” your clients and customers benefit, too—in the form of a smoother buying experience with value at each touchpoint in the journey, as well as more consistent messaging. In fact, 28 percent of sales professionals report that the biggest impact of having sales and marketing in alignment is the customer experience itself. Why does this matter so much? Today’s consumers are 5.1 times more likely to recommend an organization if their customer experience is a positive one. In turn, your organization enjoys increased organic growth and a better brand reputation.

Your sales and marketing efforts should work together in harmony to encourage leads through the sales funnel to drive customer acquisition. Otherwise, what is your goal—and how can you achieve it? That’s why a Sales and Marketing Strategy that’s created in collaboration is so important—because it details exactly how both teams will work together to achieve a common goal.

What is a Sales and Marketing Strategy? It’s a detailed plan for how these two departments can work together to reach qualified prospects and turn them into great customers and clients. Every action comes out of this unified strategy. 

There’s proof in numbers to explain why a collaborative Sales and Marketing Strategy is so critical. Organizations that have aligned their sales and marketing efforts have earned 208 percent more revenue from their marketing efforts compared to their less-unified counterparts. Plus, the organizations that work in sync average an astonishing 32 percent growth in revenue year over year.

What sorts of considerations should go into a highly-aligned Sales and Marketing Strategy?

• Target Audiences and Customer Personas: Sales and marketing professionals look at target audiences and customer personas through different lenses—which often leads to missed connections with new prospects. However a unified plan should incorporate a blend of both perspectives to arrive at a shared target audience and customer persona set that incorporates strategic, growth-driven initiatives and real-world information.

• Business Objectives and Marketing Budget: Marketing and sales teams work together to convert the same set of leads into customers and clients and achieve the same goals—so why shouldn’t they arrive at the same business objectives and budgets to make it all happen? Both departments should be involved from the beginning of the sales funnel to the very end, which means they need to be on the same page regarding their objectives and the resources they plan to use to get there.

• Brand Differentiators: Your sales and marketing departments are playing on the same team—and they need to know what makes that team so special. How does your organization uniquely cater to your target audience? What sets you apart from your competitors? You can set both departments up for success by identifying shared differentiators—everything from how you price your products and services to what resonates with real customers. These differentiators can then inform every piece of sales and marketing content to establish a unified voice and message for a consistent, seamless customer experience. 

• The Customer Buying Journey: Your sales and marketing teams should both be in the loop about each touchpoint along the customer journey from how prospective leads first hear about your brand through the end of their customer lifecycle; everything from acquisition to churn. This way, both departments can share insights to improve the customer experience and coordinate the handoff from marketing to sales.
• Brand Content: Your content does a lot of work to attract and engage customers and clients—and can even play an important role in converting leads into buyers. As such, your sales and marketing professionals should have a well-defined hand in creating compelling content, including an understanding of the role both teams play. Your Sales and Marketing Strategy should include an audit of your content to spot gaps and find opportunities to create new content that can encourage client interactions no matter where they are in the buying journey. Marketers can use this content to engage with prospects, and your sales team can pass along relevant content to interested parties. 

As your sales and marketing departments work together, data will be the real key to fostering growth. It’s how you make informed decisions and better understand the why behind what strategies are most effective for your organization. When you analyze these points, you also gain a clearer picture of where you can improve your Sales and Marketing Strategy.

Your sales metrics are the data points available that represent your overall performance. You can use them to do things like:

• Track progress toward business objectives
• Prepare new strategies for future growth
• Adjust pricing or compensation
• Pinpoint any existing issues with your current strategies

But here’s the truth. There is so much data available today—and so many ways to log and evaluate it all—that it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. Which numbers are relevant to sales and marketing? Which should you pay attention to? 

Here are a few sales metrics that can make a difference in your Sales and Marketing Strategy:

• The cost of selling and marketing, by client
• Sales lost to competitors
• The average length of the sales cycle, from marketing to conversion
• The rate of conversion at every point in the sales funnel
• The percentage of leads your sales team reaches out to versus the percentage dropped
• The percentage of highly qualified leads
• Time spent on selling activities
• Instances of marketing collateral (brochures, product sheets, etc) used by salespeople

There’s so much you can do with data to track your progress, evaluate your work compared to your key performance indicators (KPIs), and look at how your sales and marketing teams work together. It’s an indispensable tool to elevate your operations and take your successes to new levels.

At Cogo & Co., we’re committed to helping you grow your business through marketing—all at a scale that works for you. Our dedicated team will work alongside your sales and marketing teams alike to get a true finger on the pulse of what makes your organization unique, as well as what makes it flourish.

Whether you need tactical support to strengthen your efforts working on a single initiative, or you need in-depth expertise, we’re here for you with customized support.