Marketing, lead generation, prospecting, and your sales department are most likely the driving factors for new clients growth in your organization. New customers are the life blood of small & mid-sized businesses, as it is said a line goes up because a sale is made. Because this steady stream of opportunities is so important for you to expand your business it's most likely on your mind if not a focal point.
We'd like to offer a hand, some quick tips and how to advice that will keep your sales & marketing department growing and improving regardless of its current status.
At Revenue River Marketing we want to offer support to business owners and decision makers such as yourself. Consider us your resource and how-to informants for all things sales & marketing. We're going to continue putting together great content we think you'll find of interest, we hope you'll find value and ask questions whenever you'd like.
This article is really about the sum of the whole, how both marketing principles and sales activity work hand in hand to drive end results. The right combination of elements and the right team to motivate drive positive results while the wrong combination leads to lost opportunities and profits. With this much on the line it's probably on your mind often, and something you're never quite satisfied with results regardless of performance.
So how do sales & marketing work hand in hand? Let's take a look at three ways marketing supports sales first.
1. Creating Credibility -
When your marketing efforts and professional, attractive, and organized it's a HUGE boost to your sales team. Whether you want them to or not, the prospects they're calling are finding you on Google and first impressions go a long way.
2. Sales Cycle Resource -
Every sales person asks for more and better resources to help them educate prospects, provide value, and generally make their job easier. The marketing department should be working hand in hand with sales management and executive team to produce, house, and distribute the assets necessary for sales to perform.
3. Lead Generation -
Yeah, that's what you were waiting for. If your marketing department isn't attracting new website visitors, converting them into web leads, nurturing them into qualified prospects, and delivering bottom of the funnel sales opportunities they're just not doing their job. We call this job inbound marketing, the collection of all online marketing elements into juicy effectiveness.
Now let's flip the table and take a look at three ways sales supports marketing, repaying the favor if you will.
1. Speeding up the process -
When your sales department is engaged with your web analytics and are monitoring the reporting provided by your marketing software they can identify interested visitors who haven't entered the funnel. They can reach out directly, it's a lot better than cold calling.
2. Nurturing support -
Your marketing campaign certainly has some combination of a touch campaign (or does it?). Because there are many ways to touch the client before they agree to a meeting or buy it's a good idea to have your sales team walk in or network with key targets to support the emails, social media, print materials, and blog articles marketing is distributing.
3. Completing the cycle -
I know one thing, the more contracts that come in the better marketing looks as a central form of lead generation for the sales cycle. Excellent sales resources that know how to close a high rate of good opportunities makes everybody look good.
See, I told you it was a match made in heaven. Inseperable from birth, mates for life, partners in crime, lamb and tuna fish. If you're wondering why your new client contracts aren't coming in at the pace you'd like it might be time to take a look at BOTH components side by side. Ask yourself a couple key questions and dig deep into the data to support the responses.
First Question: Is there an open line of communication and information sharing, including dual access to marketing software and sales CRM?
Second Question: Do you review monthly performance goals as a combined team, getting sales & marketing resources together to celebrate each other's success?
Third Question: Are my marketing & sales department both driving towards and motivated to achieve the same end results.
Ask these questions and continue to search for tools and resources that make your more efficient and effective. Review your tool sets and their performance often, and continue to improve. Need some help? That's what our Denver Sales & Marketing Firm does, we help clients improve the entire process so if you're just plain tired of dealing with it all and want to focus on other areas of your business maybe it's time we talked about the options.