You may see your sales team as the only ones who brings home the bacon. They close leads, pursue the relationship, and generate more business in the future. However, it’s tough for them to do all that on their own. Previously, it was more common for a sales team to juggle both marketing and sales activities. But with today’s technology, investing in a marketing strategy, especially in digital marketing, is a necessity.
Sales should focus on one thing only: closing the leads. A good marketing team brings in plenty of leads so your sales team can focus on doing its thing.
We like to think of marketing as the bump and set in volleyball. Without those two, your sales team has a much harder time getting to the spike because they have to do all of it themselves. By having a team focused only on the bump and set, your spike team has a much easier and sales-focused job.
A Good Marketing Strategy
A marketing investment without a calculated strategy is worthless. This isn’t something you should take lightly. Consulting with a third-party agency to help you create your marketing strategy is highly recommended, as it allows you to work with experts to develop a strategy that is personalized for you and built from previous successes the agency has had.
Your industry likely has unique marketing needs. Generally speaking, marketing aims to nurture leads through the sales funnel to close, at which point the sales team can take over and write up a contract. Marketing creates the strategy that helps your sales team understand who the buyer is, how to approach them, and what makes them want to buy. This involves creating a buyer persona and your market profile, as well as putting together a team to develop campaigns and websites, monitor and optimize your data, and produce content to bring engagement to your brand.
Unfortunately, creating an entire marketing department within your business from the ground up can be quite involved: you need to manage salaries, benefits, space, resources, and lots of other considerations. On the other hand, letting an outsourced team handle your marketing for a fixed (or flexible) monthly cost is much simpler and provides you with more expert staff. Marketing is what those agencies do best, after all, so be sure to go into the relationship with an open mind and let them show you the ropes.
Building the Client Relationship
The majority of businesses these days are using some form of marketing, mainly digital, to bring awareness to their brand and bolster sales. Without a marketing strategy, you’re leaving a large source of prospects off the table completely. Your sales team is built and trained to close leads, but actually reaching out to a multitude of prospects just isn’t a good use of their time—they need to focus on the leads they have and spend time with them in order to continue building a relationship.
Marketing can start building that relationship for them. With a variety of outbound account-based strategies, your marketing team will nurture leads through the sales funnel directly into the hands of your sales team, where they can continue to build that relationship the way they do best.
Final Thoughts
For many businesses, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to calculate the ROI of marketing. You can see how much revenue your sales team brings in, but how much of that revenue did your marketing team support and bring in for them?
With today’s digital marketing capabilities, though, data is much easier to collect. It’s easy to see how well your marketing initiatives are paying off with data on how well your email campaigns are doing, the improved engagement on your new website, the amount of time spent on your new content pages, and other useful stats.
Marketing is not just fluff: it’s the bump set to your sales team spike. Trust us—your sales team will thank you; let them focus on closing the leads that marketing reels in.
Contact us today to learn more about creating a personalized marketing strategy for your business and how a valuable marketing team can back up your sales team.
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