Ask yourself: Would your sales team perform without any marketing collateral?
As consumers the way we intake information has changed. People now crave visual stimulants. Marketing collateral provides sales teams with the ammunition they need to support their sales pitch and visualize the benefits to the prospect. Whether it’s a short product video, PDF or printed brochure, everyone wants to see it.
It’s a given that a sales team plays a pivotal role in the growth of a company by building trust and fulfilling customer needs. Marketing’s role is to explain to your audience who you are and why they should be interested in what you offer. In today’s world, can one exist without the other?
It was determined by Sirius Decisions that companies who work to align the sales and marketing teams achieve 24% faster growth rates and 27% faster profit growth over a year.
A survey by Demand Gen calculated that the 3 biggest challenges for sales and marketing alignment are:
- Communication – 49%
- Broken/Flawed processes – 42%
- Measured by different metrics – 40%
Marketing and sales are working toward the same goal. Having this way of thinking will help close any gaps and support the company’s journey.
With that said, we’ve put together what we believe are 4 benefits of bringing your sales and marketing teams together:
1: Provide Collateral
The necessary collateral for sales is provided by the marketing team. Marketing’s role is to create promotional and social media campaigns, case studies, and coordinate trade shows, which all help to draw in leads.
Marketing can successfully draw in leads by implementing feedback from the sales team based on customers opinions and reactions. Having a stronger relationship between the two departments makes for more impactful and relevant content.
2: Fluid Lead Process
Using different tools, marketing can identify and track leads from multiple platforms enabling the sales team to properly evaluate the information before making the first call. This is also very important when it comes to events ensuring that the leads are properly managed and owned by the correct salesperson.
Leads are pulled in via marketing, they receive a sales call which closes the sale, reporting back to help marketing evaluate the success of that lead. If the lead doesn’t seem to be a good fit, then marketing is able to nurture them until they are ready to move forward in the sales process.
3: Monitor the Competition
During the sales process the sales team can find out who they are up against when talking to a prospect. While using communication technology to complete calls effectively, they will be able to hear from a greater number of prospects creating a more accurate evaluation. During these calls the sales team gets to listen to the strengths and weaknesses they need to capitalize firsthand.
This information is then relayed back to marketing in order to develop stronger strategies. Making it possible for marketing to deliver sales the appropriate collateral and information that works to their benefit.
4: Communication
Communication is key. The more that teams communicate with one another the better because everyone is in the loop and can contribute. A feature that makes this possible is SMS and Instant Messaging which drive internal collaboration. These messages can then be captured within your CRM, so no project or idea is lost. With marketing and sales working together, the ability to share ideas and information becomes integrated.
Implementing a strong relationship between your sales and marketing team can benefit both sides by creating a streamline of conversation and support. When they are synergized, it creates a more fluid structure for unified communications.
Unified Communications optimizes business process, making it possible for users to bring all forms of communication into one. And with the help of CloudCall, stored within your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. The greater the communication, the closer the teams will align with one another.
