In a perfect world, sales and marketing teams are aligned and working towards a common goal of maximising organisational growth, revenue and profits.
But alas, we don’t live in a perfect world.
Too often, and despite living under the same organisational roof, sales and marketing operate independently. Worse than that, they might also work against each other.
Maybe the sales team doesn’t utilise the communication assets marketing provides to amplify the approved corporate message to prospects and customers. Or maybe the marketing team is chuffed to provide a large number of leads to the sales team, only for sales reps to discover they are not qualified or in any shape to purchase the products and services the organisation sells.
Much angst and finger pointing then ensues.
While time, effort and resources may be spent analysing why sales and marketing are not aligned, and more importantly, why the organisation is not hitting revenue and profit targets, the Occam’s Razor principle likely applies.
This philosophical principle essentially states that the simplest explanation for a situation is likely the best. In the case of sales and marketing, you can boil it down to misaligned goals.
Marketing is charged with getting the right message to the right prospects at the right time and making it easy for prospects to buy products and services. Typical marketing measurements around reach and frequency of messages, or impressions and clicks and site visits, are relied upon to determine the performance of the marketing team.
The sales team has a clearer measurement criterion – sales. Or incremental revenue. Or customer retention. You know, hard numbers. And while the efforts of marketing and sales should be guided by a common goal and working towards landing more people who fit the Ideal Customer Profile (or ICP), in many organisations this is simply not the case.
Marketing effort should supply a list of quality leads to the sales team, but until a lead is closed, no sale has been made. The sales team needs to act in a timely manner, undertake an effective pre-sales process and do a good job of closing each sale, but they can’t achieve much with poor quality leads.
Big numbers of bad leads cause a lot of wheel-spinning and frustration for the sales team, who have to wade through lots of calls and use up a lot of shoe leather to deliver a miniscule number of sales and a dismal conversion rate. This is unproductive and disheartening for everyone.
It is far better for marketing to deliver less leads of higher quality. But the numbers game of reach, frequency, impressions and clicks is often at odds with finding quality people who are ready to buy.
In that perfect world, marketing effort should act like a silent salesperson, doing the job of educating prospects and moving them along the funnel or purchase cycle, ready for a real salesperson to take the wheel and bring them home.
For a prospect, the process should feel seamless and smooth, not like they have been engaging with two different organisations. Marketing and sales need to work together to identify the ICP, understand purchase triggers and pain points that their product or service solves, and create consistent activity in the market to get the attention of that ICP.
Good content marketing is the perfect silent salesperson – working 24/7, consistently in market, and creating a warm lead who is ready to be contacted when the time is right.
Talk to us about creating a stream of content that acts as your silent salesperson.