Sellers and marketers talk to the same people, but sellers do it one-to-one, and marketers push to a broader audience. Their roles and goals are tied together because they both approach the same people for a sales conversation. That’s why they must collaborate and cooperate in their outreach efforts.
This idea was reinforced when I interviewed Caryn Kopp, Chief Door Opener® at Kopp Consulting. As she talked about her approach to creating sales messaging that gets executive meetings, as an inbound marketer, I kept thinking about how I could digitize the sales messaging to a broader audience and support the sellers’ efforts.
Sales and marketing should work together to maximize efforts and results. Unfortunately, many companies are not doing it this way for one reason or another. It takes a concerted effort and a strategic approach to make it happen, and it’s not easy.
Here’s an overview of how marketing and sales can align as a revenue-generating team and drive better results for the company.
The Setup
In the interview with Caryn, she discussed how her team approaches business development and its best practices. Her company, Kopp Consulting, does business development for other businesses every day and successfully starts sales conversations that lead to deals. Before they begin their sales outreach, they have a setup period to create their sales plan. Caryn’s planning process from the biz dev side is the same planning process required for the marketing side.
- In Caryn’s words, create target prospect lists that would “find you to be the obvious solution and be willing to pay as soon as they know you exist.” Sellers and marketers will use the same list in different ways.
- Develop relevant one-to-one sales messaging that “creates urgency for the executive to take the meeting.” Marketing will share the same talking points with the online audience in different platforms, formats, and styles. They can also expand on the topics more deeply.
- Mirror the buyer persona. Caryn’s team uses a peer-to-peer approach, meaning they “don’t have entry-level business developers calling on senior executives and CEOs.” Marketing will create an online presence that aligns with the target prospects’ interests and values.
Building a foundation like this takes some deep thinking but is worth the time, effort, and resources because it gets measurable results.
The Aligned Sales and Marketing Approach
The marketing audience and message should align with and support the sales audience and message. It’s the same message to the same people, just formatted and promoted to a broader audience. Here are the steps to sales and marketing alignment:
- Sellers use the foundational audience and messaging to have sales conversations. When they are aligned with marketing, they link to the digital form of the content in their one-to-one conversations to reinforce their message. The digital content can be viewed anytime or anywhere, so prospects can review it when it’s most convenient for them.
- Marketers use the foundational audience and messaging to:
- Ensure the company has a solid online presence that attracts target prospects to follow, even if they aren’t ready to buy.
- Engage the foundational qualified target prospects online as they progress deeper through the buyers’ journey.
- Attract new prospects that aren’t on the foundational target prospect list, generating new leads for sellers to start conversations with.
When a target prospect, especially one that a seller has professionally approached, is feeling some pain and sees your brand pop up somewhere online, they’ll give the seller a call. It’s a double-whammy for your growth efforts.
Aligning sales and marketing around the same target prospect list and talking points is a win-win! Sellers have a stronger message and more credibility and trust, and marketers bring in more new potential customers to push sales pipeline growth.
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