INCOMING HOT TAKE!
Are you ready?
Here it comes:
Sales are important.
THERE!
I said it.
Sales are so important for any startup or established corporation.
When you make a sale, you make money. And when you make enough money, eventually you make a profit. And a profit keeps you and your business afloat.
Ok, so with this revolutionary new information, we have determined that sales are indeed, important.
But they aren’t the only important thing.
There are lots of aspects to a business that is important, including marketing.
Marketing is,
“the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service,”
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Clearly, marketing is important, because without it, how are people going to know about your product? How are you going to pique people’s interest?
Not only is marketing crucial to your business but it is also necessary that your marketing and sales be aligned.
Well… necessary for a successful business.
And an outsourced marketing team may be just the thing to help with that.
A LITTLE MORE ABOUT MARKETING
Marketing may look simple, like all you need to do is film a funny commercial and come up with a weird catch phrase like “Dilly Dilly” or “waaaassssuuuupppppppp!”
But it is way more complicated than that.
Behind these seemingly random commercials are tons of research, psychology and long developed marketing strategies.
A marketing team also:
- Determines a target audience
- Designs promotional campaigns
- Attracts customers
- Creates a message
- Increases product awareness
- Releases content
- Helps with web and logo design
Photo credit: Pixabay
Then you also get things like digital marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing, marketing automation, and more. It’s no wonder that every marketing department is busy and has a lot to do. A marketing agency has its work cut out for it.
So if it wasn’t clear earlier, marketing is very, very important.
HOW MARKETING HELPS SALES
Leads
Your sales team needs leads. A lead is someone who has expressed interest in your product or business.
It is really hard for your team to generate good marketing leads.
Cold calling and emailing just ain’t getting it done anymore.
Just think about how annoying it is when you get a random call at the most inconvenient time from someone asking about your refrigerator needs.
Marketing teams won’t just be better at generating leads, but they’ll be able to create systems that will bring leads to your website.
Photo credit: Wikimedia
This will make things so much better for your sales team because it is far easier to sell something to people that they are already interested in.
Your marketing team will also be able to design messaging in a way to target specific people who will enjoy or need your product.
And along the way, they can feed your sales team info they have gathered from these leads, from simple contact info to their interest level of your product, to their consumer habits, and possibly more.
Creating a brand
Your marketing team can help create a brand for your company, which will be super beneficial to your sales team.
A brand is “The marketing practice of creating a name, symbol or design that identifies and differentiates a product from other products,” according to Entrepreneur.com.
Photo credit: flickr
Building your brand and promoting brand awareness will help sales by creating consistent messaging that they can use, the specific direction in their sales pitch, and a defined target audience. One of the essential elements of brand awareness, so make sure you have an excellent brand logo, but if you’re still confused how to make it stand out, use a free logo maker and create your unique logo which will lead you everywhere.
For example, in the world of athletic wear, two different companies are Nike and LuluLemon.
When you think of Nike, you think of the BEST. They sponsor the best athletes and have the best gear.
With LuluLemon, you think of higher-end and more fashionable athletic clothes.
In the end, they are both selling athletic clothing and accessories. But when you have a brand, it makes it easier for your sales team to know how to sell their products, what to say about them, and who to target.
In addition, having a brand helps:
- Improve recognition
- Create trust
- Build personally connections
- Supports advertising
- Generate new customers
Photo Credit: flickr
WHY THEY NEED TO BE ALIGNED
With marketing and sales so heavily reliant on each other, it only makes sense that your marketing and sales team would work together. Both need to understand the sales process and how to refine your sales funnel.
The fact of the matter though is that for a lot of companies, that isn’t the case.
More than 55% of marketers don’t know what assets salespeople use most, and more than 44% of salespeople don’t know what assets are used by fellow salespeople, per Kapost.
That’s not good.
When your sales and marketing team don’t work together, it can have several negative effects. Sales enablement is key if you want to start getting a profit and generate more than one growth opportunity.
One being inconsistent messaging.
Inconsistent Messaging
Imagine if you see an ad campaign that really resonated with you. The messaging, the brand, the product, it all really spoke to you.
Now imagine going to make the purchase, but you got a totally different impression of the product. What you are hearing from the salespeople doesn’t line up at all with what you heard in the marketing.
Wouldn’t you doubt the trustworthiness of this product and company? Wouldn’t you question if they really knew what they were selling, pushing you away from the product?
It would be like if you saw a commercial for Nike, and you thought their running shoes would make you faster because some of the best runners wear them.
But when you go to buy them, the sales rep is telling you how great you would look in them.
You would probably start to doubt if these shoes would really make you faster. You’d probably be thinking that they are designed to be fashionable, not for performance, which is what you wanted.
Having your sales and marketing team work together can avoid this.
By aligning the two, you can create consistent messaging and select a specific target audience, to not only eliminate this possibility but help create more tailored marketing campaigns and sales pitches.
Lack of information
If your sales and marketing team isn’t communicating, then both will be negatively affected by a lack of information.
On the sales side, this lack of information can lead to them blindly selling to people they don’t know.
Sure, you may know that they are interested in your product, but not much else.
If there is communication, however, your sales team could get more information that could help, like demographics (such as age, gender, location), personality, spending habits, level of interest, and more.
On the marketing side, if they don’t have information on the product, target audience and how the sales team is going about their sales pitches, it can lead to vague and generic advertising.
But with that information, they can work with the sales team to create a more targeted, engaging and meaningful marketing campaign.
This will be more likely to resonate with people, and the marketing team can send leads who really are interested in the product, and ones that the sales team can more easily sell to.
A Better Work Environment
Photo credit: pxhere
When everyone in your company is working together, it has the potential to create a healthier and happier work environment.
People will have the chance to develop stronger relationships with more people.
And when you care about the people you work with, you’ll naturally want to work harder because you know it will benefit them as well as you.
This is shown in research. Employees are two times more likely to be engaged if they have a friend at work, per Raconteur.
HOW TO KEEP THEM ALIGNED
So you know you need your sales and marketing teams aligned, but how do you get that to happen?
The key, just like in romantic relationships, is communication.
Photo credit: Needpix
Start off by having meetings where both teams can work to establish their messaging. This means brand, target audience, what they want their product to say, pretty much anything needed to make a specific marketing strategy and sales pitch.
It shouldn’t end there though.
Keeping regular communication is crucial, so sales and marketing can keep each other updated.
That way they can talk about what is or isn’t working and adjust when needed to keep themselves aligned.
Scheduling weekly meetings or conference calls and creating a system of continuous reporting can help with this.
WHY SHOULD YOU OUTSOURCE
So you’re first thought may be:
“Ok, if I want my marketing team to fully comprehend my product and its message, I should probably keep marketing in-house.”
But not necessarily.
In some cases, it might make sense to market in-house, depending on the size of your business, budget, etc.
In many cases, however, it would make a great deal of sense to outsource a marketing team.
Professional marketing teams come with years of experience and are equipped with some of the best marketing strategies, which could save you and your team a lot of trial and error.
They will also be able to look at your product with a fresh and new perspective on the marketing side, helping to create a strong and unique campaign.
And if you hire the right team, there isn’t any reason they can’t work cohesively with you and your sales staff.
They will also be far more efficient, which could actually save you money in the long run.
WHERE TO START YOUR SEARCH?
If you’re looking to outsource to a professional marketing team, consult with Pearl Lemon Sales! Book a call to talk to you about your marketing needs today!
