Marketing and Sales Alignment Fosters Better Outcomes
Once upon a time it was rare to witness the B2B sales team aligned with the B2B marketing team. And, once upon a time gasoline cost 50 cents per gallon. Times have changed a ton!
Times have changed! How do #Sales & #Marketing align in the #buyersjourney ? @bernieborges answersClick To Tweet
The Best Sales Pros are Aligned with Marketing
The modern B2B sales professional understands the concept of building audience. To capture the attention of your audience in the three-second window that you have on a first visit, you need to grab their attention with compelling content that meets their need in the moment. In a nutshell, I’m suggesting that you collaborate with your marketing team to leverage all the content assets they provide to help you succeed in your sales efforts. If you need a guide, I’ve written one here: “How to Get More Traffic and Leads Through Content Marketing.”
B2B #Sales Pros, align with #marketing to win more! @BernieBorgesClick To TweetHere are three ways the modern B2B sales professional can align with marketing to win more.
Branding
When marketers publish any content whether it’s a website, an e-book, a webinar, a video, handouts for an event…It doesn’t matter what content the marketing team creates, it ALWAY has to align with the brand.
But, what is a brand anyway? Here is my favorite definition of a brand – any brand. “A brand is the promise you make to your customers.”
What is the promise of your personal brand?
If (for example) you sell medical supplies, perhaps the promise of your personal brand is quality supplies in a specific niche of medical supplies such as orthopedics. In this example, your professional brand should support this promise with every digital interaction you take.
So, I urge you to assess your personal brand promise. If you haven’t previously defined it, write it down. Then, do a “gap analysis.” Do you have a gap between how you currently engage in social selling activities and your personal brand promise? Are you active in social media groups that align with your personal brand? Do you curate content that aligns with your personal brand and share it through LinkedIn and Twitter or other channels where your buyer is engaged? Do you create original content that aligns with your personal brand? This article from Viveka von Rosen offers 15 ways to rock your personal brand.
Visually Centric Digital Engagement
I’m sure you’ve noticed….Social media engagement has become very visual (duh)…The ability to share images on social media is pervasive across all social channels, including LinkedIn!
Marketers understand this and as such create visually compelling content and amplify it on social media. And, you can and should do the same.
Take pictures that you can share. Some common examples of pictures that B2B sales professionals can share on social media include customer events, annual conferences, local events, etc., provided that you’re permitted to take and post pictures.
If you’re restricted from taking and sharing your own pictures, re-purpose pictures published by your marketing department. Anything published by your marketing team in the public domain should be okay for you to share. In fact, your marketing department will love you if you become an employee advocate by sharing images they publish online. Be sure to select images that align with your personal brand.
Don't know what image to share on #socialmedia ? Here's a tip from @BernieBorges for #sales prosClick To TweetConversions that Lead to Sales
Marketers care a lot about conversions. This isn’t the same kind of conversion you care about as a sales professional. When you’re aligned with marketing, you want to leverage content assets to convert a contact into sales conversations that can eventually lead to a customer.
In this blog post, I covered how to get engaged in the B2B buyer’s journey during their research phase. When the buyer is conducting research, she is often not ready to have a conversation with a sales professional.
Your goal should be to convert that buyer from an invisible researcher, to a willing conversationalist. In order to do that, you have to be useful to the buyer. You have to earn a reputation as a trusted resource to the buyer. And, you have to convert contacts with her network into conversations. A natural outcome of being aligned with marketing should be to help position you as a trusted resource to the buyer through content assets provided by marketing that you can share in digital channels.
Insert UR #personalbrand into the buyers journey by aligning #sales w/ #marketing. @bernieborgesClick To TweetThe modern B2B sales professionals is aligned with marketing. Hopefully, such alignment is not by accident. Organizations who are intentional about marketing and sales alignment generate better sales outcomes.
If you want to learn more about content that converts, I urge you to download our white paper here:
10 thoughts on “15 LinkedIn Profile Optimization Tips to Get Found This 2023”
My LinkedIn account was ranking on the first page for best mommys blog keyword quite a few years back and I didn’t have any idea. While working, I stumbled upon the Analytic section of LinkedIn and saw that most of the visitors are coming from search engine later on I realized that in my profile I’ve used “Mommy’s blog” word a lot of time and that is the reason why it was ranking well on SERP. This is how I came to know about SEO and I was also amazed by the fact that how easy it was to rank for competitive keywords back then. Anyways loved your article and please share more tips on SEO.
Thanks for sharing. The number of times you mention a word or phrase is still a factor for sure.
We love hearing tips as well as questions our reader, so keep them coming!
Should I change keywords overtime based on what’s popular on the internet?
There is a lot of value in this article, especially for those looking to improve their visibility on LinkedIn. My favorite of the fifteen tips shared in this article is number nine. I’ve observed that people with custom profile links, seem to get more attention than those who haven’t customized their LinkedIn profile URL. Interesting article, thank you for taking the time to put it together.
Customizing LinkedIn URLs create more visibility for sure! Thank you, Bret.
I agree with the recommendations, they are a very important part of our strategy on LinkedIn, it can give confidence to potential customers (or leaders when someone is looking for a job).
People shouldn’t underestimate keywords on their LinkedIn profile! This helped potential buyers to find me on LinkedIn more easily when they searched for certain products and/or services. Thanks Viveka!
Thank you for another great blog post. For the alt text and/or naming images, do you mean two to three different keyword phrases as a maximum, like this?
B2B cybersecurity content marketing writer , technical writing cybersecurity content , cybersecurity technical writer , David Geer
Or can you add more keyword phrases than this?
Hey David – I honestly don’t know the efficacy of adding more keywords than that. I would stick with what you have above.
All the information is very helpful which can help us to increase our Profile ranking on LinkedIn. Another big interesting article, this blog is very useful for the Optimization of my LinkedIn profile.
I also get much knowledge from this blog.
thank you keep sharing.