Follow these tips to bring sweet harmony to your sales and marketing teams, regardless of what field you’re working in.
Two of the most important teams for any business are the sales team and the marketing team. They each have their own goals and agendas, which can cause some friction when you are trying to get the most from both of these valuable teams.
Don’t think they are conflicting? The Content Marketing Institute reported that 90 per cent of the material made by the marketing team for the sales department ends up scrapped.
Due to the conflicting nature of the sales and marketing teams, it’s important that we stop to think about how we can bring them together to improve our businesses as a whole. The following tips explain how you can use both groups to bring harmony to your business model, regardless of your field.
1. Find the customer sweet spot.
Here’s how it works: The marketing team looks into data and leads and finds out what kind of people the business should try to appeal to. On the same note, the sales team looks through their data and they can see what kind of people are actually purchasing the product you’re selling.
You can bring both of these teams together to build your customer sweet spot. By combining the data that both teams have, you’ll be able to find your ideal customer. If you think of it as an overlapping chart, on the left you have who you should be selling to, and on the right, you have your actual customers.
The centre is the “customer sweet spot.” These are the people who are most likely to buy your product or service. Both the marketing and the sales team can benefit from the combination of this data.
2. Uses sales data to overcome marketing objections.
One of the hardest parts of selling your products is overcoming customer objections. Where do you discover customer objections? In your sales data.
Your sales team is going to know and understand what kind of problems they run into when they are offering your product and services to potential customers. They no doubt have a list of common customer objections such as “What makes you different?” and “Why is your product worth our time?”
Here’s the brilliant part: Once you understand the common objections your team faces, you can start to shift some of those issues over to your marketing team so they can prepare solutions for your sales team.
As an example, let’s say you’re launching a new product to customers on a segment of your current customer lead list. After finding out common objections, your marketing team can devise an email that will go out to these customers in advance to the product. As a result, customers will have their objections answered before they can even raise concern. This will bring both of your teams together and help you boost your sales figures.
3. Build a constantly improving cycle.
The marketing and sales experience is a constantly growing cycle. When your marketing team does well, the sales team does well. When both teams are doing well, your business grows.
One of the best ways you can bring these two teams together is by reminding them that they constantly complement and improve each other as more data is fed into the business.
Your marketing team will continue to work and create material for your sales team. This will help your sales team close the deal when they are working with potential customers. Remind your sales team to take notes, figure out what part of the marketing did well, and what part could use some improvement.
Have weekly meetings where the sales team and marketing team come together to hash out ideas. If you treat them as two important links in the sales chain instead of one being more powerful than the other, you’ll help build a strong team with a rich company culture that is built on a framework of teamwork instead of opposition.
You have to remind both teams that without each other, the other would fail. They should constantly work together to improve and build a business that everyone can be proud of.
This article is repurposed from Business.com
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