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Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
Chris asked me this holy-grail question: how can marketing help sales and vice versa?
Well, the question is very abstract. Let’s bring it down a notch. Marketing can do many things to help with sales. The question is what marketing wants to do to help sales and whether sales agrees that it would be helpful.
In many cases, marketing helps sales build a pipeline, which means getting potential leads or marketing qualified leads for sales. Marketing can also help sales on messaging, what to say and how to say it, about new products and offerings. From messaging, marketing can naturally extend its help to content creation for the sales team and even incorporate content into sales onboarding and continuous training.
Marketing tends to be on the digital forefront way before sales or any other organizations in a company.
Therefore, marketers can transfer their knowledge to help with social selling. They can also share do’s and don’ts on social media. Some marketers are very good at doing marketing research, which may also apply to competitive landscape analysis. There are so many things marketing can do to help sales, Chris. The sky is limit.
Ok, let’s turn this around. What can sales do to help marketing?
Well, sales should educate marketing on how they sell and proactively tell marketing about the challenges they encounter. Brainstorm with Marketing to help solve some of the sales’ impasses. The example I use all the time is a whiskey company wanted to increase its shelf space in the supermarkets and liquor stores. The sales team worked with their marketing team to run free-tasting events in multiple stores and use geo-targeted social media paid ads to drive traffic to the stores. That’s a great example of using marketing to close a sales deal.
I understand a budget, resource, organization structure, and business priorities tend to get in the way of how sales and marketing should work together in enterprises. However, it doesn’t hurt to open a dialogue with your marketing peers. Help them understand your needs and challenges.
The more you talk, the more you’ll find ways to work together. It’s like any good relationship, you need to work at it.
So, the short answer is, start talking and keep the conversation going is the best way for marketing and sales to help each other.
If you have any questions on how to bridge that relationship, reach out to me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or my website. Let’s have a chat.
Again, if you like the podcast, please share with your colleagues and friends, or leave a review/comment on iTunes, it will be greatly appreciated.
Before you leave, make sure to check out the previous podcast episodes!
So keep hustling, my friends. You got this.
What can Pam Didner do for you?
Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.
