Want To Increase Sales Revenue? Work More Closely With Your Marketing Team.

You’ve been in business long enough to know there has always been a battle between sales and marketing. Business owners are wired to hire more sales than marketing staff. Why? It’s usually cheaper.

Hire more sales staff, pay them a commission, increase the amount of people prospecting... but, the old techniques of prospecting are becoming stale and quite frankly, annoying.

Telling your team to cold call 40 prospects a day is not the answer. This disruptive tactic leaves a bad taste in the mouths of potential strong candidates to feed your bottom line.

So what is the answer? Create a relationship between sales & marketing.

Companies that have aligned marketing and sales departments have an increased annual revenue growth of 32%. This is because both parties have a mutual understanding that buying behaviors have changed.

Why should marketing be listening to sales and vice versa?

Simply put, it’s reported that 70% of buying decisions are made before a prospect even gets on the phone with a sales person. B2B decision makers are educating themselves on day-to-day problems and they are looking for solutions.

If your marketing department is unsure what those problems are, it’s going to take them longer to produce the solution-based content, lead generating content your website needs.

The most seasoned sales people have some of the best insight into these issues and marketers who regularly meet with these people create the most compelling, thought-leading pieces of content.

Have your sales team discuss challenges they are facing in reaching new prospects and closing deals with your marketing team. When your company opens this line of communication between marketing and sales, both sides will be more efficient; aiding in the creation of better content that produces better leads.  

CRMs in Sales and Marketing Alignment

A CRM software should help seamlessly close the gap between sales and marketing by providing data on website visits, conversion opportunities, prospect opportunities, and contacts converting, while also being able to help sales qualify those contacts into quality leads.

This data should be discussed monthly between the sales and marketing teams to help better understand your buyer personas.

When sales and marketing are working effectively together, it creates a rock-star atmosphere that expands your reach, pulls targeted visitors to your website, and converts quality sales leads.

Your marketing team can better understand the prospects’ challenges as the sales team educates them on what’s taking place on their calls and create value-based content to support sales long before they even make that call.

So where do you start? Simple! Start by asking your sales team the below questions:

Q1) Is your sales team familiar with the inbound sales methodology? (If they aren’t, suggest that they get Inbound Sales certified by HubSpot!)

Q2) Does your sales team have value-based, educational content at their disposal to email prospects before sales calls?

Q3) Is your sales team still making cold calls to prospects before knowing anything anything about your company?

Q4) Are they calling every lead that comes through the website? (i.e. are they calling people who download an eBook?)

Q5) Is your sales team familiar with the benefits of email sequencing?

Q6) Do you know that amount of hours/time spent on reaching prospects?

Q7) Do you have access to a sales productivity dashboard that shows activity of each salesperson?

Feel free to copy and paste these questions into an email for your sales and marketing managers. The answers will help you better understand the relationship between your sales and marketing teams and what improvements need to be made. If you're already using a CRM, the answers can most likely be found there, but if not, consider getting started with the HubSpot CRM. (It's free!)

This will get you started in the right direction to closing the gap between these two teams and produce better, more profitable leads for your sales team! Make inbound and your website work for you, not against you!