Inbound marketing isn’t just about the marketing team. It directly affects the sales team and the lead generation process. Therefore, it’s extremely vital that your sales & marketing teams are aligned.
I recently read an article entitled, “3 Ways Inbound Marketing Can Give Sales a Helping Hand,” and it offers up some good tips on how inbound marketing can help the sales team; however, it’s not just about helping the sales team – it’s about the sales and marketing teams working well together. Unfortunately, many organizations keep the two teams separate; they haven’t fully grasped the changing roles caused by evolving technology.
Below are tips from the article along with my thoughts on the importance of alignment between sales & marketing for each point.
Define Clear Targets – Ensure both the sales & marketing teams have a clear understanding of who the target audience is. The content created by the marketing team should speak to the right audience. Marketing needs to work with the sales team to develop buyer personas and develop content that attracts the attention of those buyer personas.
Warm Up Leads – It’s much easier to get a warm lead to buy than it is to get a cold lead to buy. So, the sales team needs help in getting cold leads warmed up. A great way to do this is to have sales reps provide useful and educational content to potential buyers. When sales reps provide feedback to markers about prospects’ pain points, the marketing team can provide content that will be helpful and relevant to sales reps and their prospects.
Create Content – As we’ve already discussed above, content marketing plays a big role in of how sales attracts and warms up leads. The majority of buyers today do most of their own research before even considering talking to a sales rep. So, it’s vital that marketing creates the right content to drive traffic and leads to the website. It’s critical that the content provides valuable information that attracts the right prospects and keeps them there.
“Over half (57%) of the selling process is completed for consumers before a company even has a chance to interact with them.” (Hubspot)
As the statistic from Hubspot demonstrates, more than half of the selling process is completed before the sales rep ever speaks to the buyer. So, ensuring your company is putting the right content out there to attract the attention of potential buyers means having your sales & marketing teams aligned and working towards the same goals. If you need help getting your sales & marketing teams aligned, contact us today!
Read the article 3 Ways Inbound Marketing Can Give Sales a Helping Hand.
2 thoughts on “Inbound Marketing Success = Sales & Marketing Alignment”
Thank you ,Allana
I appreciate your opinion and fully agree that the marketing teams are aware who and where the target audience is and what content is suitable to be presented, plus how to be presented.With the help of products from Microsoft and Dell our marketing teams managed to establish a good relation with our existing customers in a number of social networks like LinkedIn, Customerso,Medium.This helped us to get to new clients and to improve the sales.We can now roughly estimate what persentage of our clients is ready to purchase by the number of the conversations,replies,shares,likes,etc well before the actual sale takes place.
Thanks for sharing your story Martin! It’s so cool how technology has changed how we do business. It sounds like you have a great process set up to be able to identify what percentage of your customers are ready to buy based on social engagement…that’s awesome!