How Marketing Can Make Your Sales Department More Effective (infographic)

Inbound marketing is a holistic approach. You can’t focus strictly on one aspect (for example, an advertising campaign to increase website traffic).

Instead, effective inbound marketing must encompass everything from initial brand awareness through the sale, with an emphasis on understanding how it all works together. An essential part of that is bringing the marketing and sales teams together to find ways through which marketing can contribute to sales’ success. After all, when the sales team is successful, the entire company succeeds, and marketing plays a key role in developing the structure from which sales operates.

Now, ask yourself these four questions about how your marketing and sales teams work together to achieve corporate objectives.

1. Is lead intelligence from automated lead nurturing and landing page forms passed along to sales when leads are transitioned?

The customer profiles built through lead nurturing should be integrated into your CRM usage and passed along to provide sales with a head start before they ever pick up the phone to call marketing-qualified leads< https://www.jonespr.net/inboundaccelerator/four-steps-to-setting-your-definition-of-a-marketing-qualified-lead>.

Learn more:

• How to Build Customer Profiles With Lead Nurturing
• Is Your Marketing Department Withholding Information?

2. Are sales team members kept informed of new marketing materials that could be useful for their leads and customers?

Are your company’s sales reps included in the 65 percent of sales reps who say they can't find content to send to prospects? (Source)

Don’t let that be the case. If your marketing team has put in the research, time and effort to create great content, make sure the rest of the company knows it is there and how to use it. Consider sharing a monthly digest of blog posts, whitepapers, videos, bylined articles and other materials created with the sales team. This could include tips on how they can incorporate that content into their outreach and which prospects or customers might benefit most from each article.

Read on: Close More Deals By Giving Sales Access To Marketing Content.

3. Does marketing assist in creating sales-specific materials such as product guides and comparison charts that maintain key messaging points?

Put marketing’s creative team to work building out product guides, comparison charts and other sales materials that carry forward the same key messaging points as other content. This is what we mean at JONES when we talk about creating full funnel campaigns.

Research shows that 95 percent of buyers buy from someone who gave them content at each stage of the buyer’s journey. It just makes sense for all of that content to flow smoothly from one stage to the next, with consistent messaging and focus.

4. Are sales team leaders included in periodic content and campaign planning to offer insight into the types of content created?

Misalignment between sales and marketing technologies and processes costs B2B companies 10% of revenue or more per year. (Source)

In addition to keeping marketing and sales aligned to provide consistent messaging and a shared understanding of the target market and what each department will bring to the table, alignment also means working together between departments to identify the technology and processes that each will use and how to integrate them so that the connection is seamless.

HubSpot offers one way of flowing seamlessly from content management to automated lead nurturing and into building customer profiles with an industry-leading CRM solution. JONES is a certified HubSpot partner, and this post tells you a little more about why we love working with HubSpot (and why other businesses do, too). 

HubSpot places a strong emphasis on solutions that help marketing and sales work together. Find more tips on bringing your marketing and sales departments into alignment in this free ebook: Complete Guide To Unifying Marketing & Sales. You can also learn more about HubSpot through other posts on our blog, or talk with us about how your marketing department can enable sale by scheduling a no-obligation consultation here.