In Bernie Borges’ recent article on Lead Generation through Content Marketing, he mentions that sales teams depend on marketing to deliver leads, and when they do, the leads often aren’t qualified. When working with companies that have sales and marketing teams, it’s crucial to get the two to the table in order to get a clearer picture of each other’s needs. And vital to this process is making sure that the Buyer Personas for Marketing and Sales are aligned.
Your #success may depend on #BuyerPersona #alignment for Marketing & Sales @LinkedInExpertClick To TweetIt’s a given, right? Not so fast!
The marketing team might have spent a significant amount of money and time creating buyer personas upon which their entire marketing platform and content calendar rests. But what if the sales team is actually focused on a different quadrant? What if the content that the marketing team is creating is misaligned with the product or service being sold and the prospects the sales team is targeting? This is more common than you think. In fact, it might be why 77% of buyers don’t believe that your sales team understands them or their business. (Accenture)
Misalignment of Sales & Marketing #BuyerPersonas is a common problem! @LinkedInExpert #SocialSellingClick To Tweet
You can see why it’s key for the sales and marketing departments to be in communication. They both are going to be very attached to their process, so you might need a neutral third party to moderate the discussion. Find a facilitator—either someone in-house or even hire an outside consultant to broker the discussion. It will be well worth the extra effort.
These are the steps I recommend:
Marketing:
- Have Marketing come to the table with their buyer personas and their justifications for the ones they’ve chosen. The clearer the better.
- Marketing should also have the opportunity to explain their ongoing campaigns and the benefit of their promotion.
- Marketing should highlight successful campaigns and educate Sales on the process and progress.
Sales:
- Ask your top sales people to choose their top three clients/accounts.
- Ask them to, as clearly as possible, define who these clients are, what they do, the industries they are in, their titles, education, and gender (their buyer persona.) You can share Brynne Tillman’s article on Buyer Personas on using LinkedIn to help them refine their personas.
- Ask your sales people to describe the buying process:
- What is the typical lead time?
- Are they engaged in inbound or outbound?
- Is there an inside sales team?
- Are their best leads referral based?
- Do they actively engage in cold calling?
- Are they using tools like LinkedIn? How many people are they speaking with to close the sale?
- What do the proposals look like?
- What is a typical dollar amount?
- Are they using a CRM system to track leads?
These questions may seem incredibly obvious to Sales, but Marketing might be surprised at the answers.
This conversation is not about who is right and who is wrong, it’s about allowing the two departments to better understand the assets and opportunities available. We want them to work together instead of against each other.
What if Marketing was under the assumption that the CTO was the crucial decision maker, but in reality, the successful sales person had been working with the DBAs? If all the content was focused on informing the CTO of their options, but the CTO relied on the DBA, who had no interest in that particular content, then the content marketing campaign could be completely askew!
And what if the sales person was spending hours researching for new content (or worse, using outdated, old content) to prove value to his or her prospect? There could be up-to-date and powerful white papers, infographics and case studies available for them to use—that they just didn’t know about.
There could be untapped markets just waiting to be explored, that marketing was unaware of.
Sales might discover a whole wealth of valuable resources they were unacquainted with.
Discover a whole wealth of valuable resources with #BuyerPersona #Alignment! @LinkedinExpert with tipsClick To TweetStart with a conversation that results in the creation of content that will provide bona fide leads from people who are either ready to buy or have potential to be buyers in the near future.
Alignment of Sales and Marketing is one of our core pillars at Vengreso! If we can help you accelerate the conversation between Sales and Marketing in your organization, get in touch.
Find out more about creating content that generates quality leads 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.