The growing need to integrate sales and marketing functions with companies has been long discussed within companies. Customers expect an excellent experience at all contact points with the company and throughout the purchase process, and 60% -70% of this process is online. This makes it increasingly difficult to divide the different stages of the client's lifecycle between sales and marketing.
Quality content is the key to success in marketing and sales
'Content is king' is the marketing mantra of the past 5-7 years, as customers are attracted to the quality content that is relevant to each of the online platforms where the brand is present. So, the marketing function is required to create more and more content in various forms (video, text, audio, images) to achieve a balanced mix of pull and push marketing tactics.
On the sales side, there is a clear pressure on the field agents to turn potential customers into loyal customers by providing them with relevant information. Digital communication is a powerful tool for long-term development of sales relationships. That's why all sales agents need quality content and the best skills to turn it into a long-term relationship building tool with their customers.
The war between marketing and sales must cease
Unfortunately, traditionally, marketing and sales are not taught to collaborate. Formal separation as functions in the company, access to different budgets, complementary objectives, but measured with such different indicators, make the collaboration difficult. The perception that marketing spends budgets and sales generates growth and profit does not help integrate and collaborate with these internal departments.
However, technology makes this integration not only possible, but also extremely effective and natural. Collaboration between the marketing and sales department makes the work of both teams much easier.
This approach has the following 7 main positive effects:
• Facilitates collaboration between the sales team and the marketing team
• Leads to creating high-quality content for customers
• Involves sales agents in creating content and gives them greater motivation to send it with confidence to prospects / clients
• Establishes 1-2 clear processes leading to collaboration between marketing and sales without invading their territory or specific role
• It generates synergy between teams and facilitates innovation and creativity
• Demonstrates the greater value that is obtained through such collaboration
• It creates the premises for a higher degree of future integration between the two teams
Thus, sales teams with information from customer interaction help create highly effective content to build customer relationships.
Types of input sales can provide to marketing
Although the information required for a content generation can be referred to by sales agents in the CRM and taken over from the marketing team, it is very important that the process is a direct one to have the integrating effect. The marketing people need to talk at least once a month with sales agents to get both input and feedback.
The types of content that can be obtained through this process can be the following:
• Case studies on how customers have saved client’s time, money and energy with the company's product
• Stories about sales that have started less well but have become successful because technical or other valuable information has been given to the customer
• Information about the heuristic decision criteria used by different categories of clients to make the decision to collaborate with the company
• Sets of additional requirements that add value to certain sub-segments / categories of clients and why
• Types of objections encountered most often and their motivation from the client's point of view
All this information from sales agents can become inspirational and generating content like video, audio, images, text for the marketing team. Of course, everything will need to be integrated and processed according to the marketing strategy and the company's general line of communication. But the most important gain will be the collaboration between the marketing and sales team to find out what content would help educate and inform customers..
