The systematic planning...

Marketing is the systematic planning, implementation and control of business activities to bring together buyers and sellers.

5 Golden Rules of Marketing to Increase Sales.

Identify Your Customer Journey

Before anything else, Sales and Marketing need to identify the customer journey and agree on who is responsible over the different stages of the sales cycle.  Historically, Marketing would simply identify a prospect and Sales would guide the prospect down the sales funnel.  But as more and more customers self-educate online (Marketing Leadership Council Research indicates customers are 57% through the sales cycle before they are prepared to talk to sales), this means the first parts of the sales funnel now sit with Marketing.

Change The Focus From Volume to Quality.

A lead is no longer someone who “clicked-through” an email. Instead, as marketers we need to get smart. We need to analyze the data and identify which resources lead to a sales conversion. Often times it will be a series of content resources, and using this info will help you identify which resources are consumed at which points in the sales cycle. This will allow you to “score” each piece of content. For example, white papers and website visits are often the first steps of content maps followed by content addressing solutions to specific issues in the forms of webinars and eBooks. Ultimately a request for a demonstration or pricing questions is often a strong indicator the prospect is ready to talk to Sales.

However, this does answer our initial question of “what is a lead” or identify when a prospect is “Sales ready”, to answer this requires an understanding of lead quality and lead scoring.

Rely on Prospect Intelligence To Increase Conversions.

Data is business gold and it is vital that both teams are sharing crucial information that generates leads. Marketing, for example, should share all lead intelligence; from initial contact with the company to the social media interactions, web pages visited and content pieces downloaded. Using this information, the sales team can then identify the customers’ pain points and prep for the initial sales call, to ensure greater conversion.

Sales should also be sharing information back to Marketing, such as the number of communications and the tactics used to communicate with a lead, once the lead is open, its status, whether  it is in progress, abandoned or closed, and if closed, the revenue value.

By sharing data, Sales can shorten the sales cycle and increase conversion rates and Marketing can constantly improve campaigns and invest in campaigns that generate the highest return on investment.

Improve Your Marketing Message With The Help of Sales.

I hate to admit it but Marketing doesn’t always have the best ideas relating to content topic and messages. Often Sales can offer valuable input, thanks to the insight they get while talking to prospect and customers alike. It is, therefore, imperative that Marketing consults with Sales when planning campaigns. But secondly, it is equally important that Sales embraces this role as a content provider. By supporting Marketing in content creation, Sales ensures the material promoted by the company addresses the popular questions and pain points of customers.

Initially, Sales must consider the most frequently asked questions, both positive and negative in terms of selling points and feed this information back to the marketing team. Marketing should use this information to generate new content and in turn, make Sales aware of the resources and the customer question it addresses. Sales can then use the prospect intelligence of the content that has been digested to know which questions to address.

Increase The Productivity Of The Sales and Marketing Teams. 

Inbound marketing required the creation of creating high value content; a time consuming activity on already over-worked marketing teams. One way to address this issue is to improve Sales and Marketing productivity by introducing Marketing Automation Software. These business tools help reduce repetitive tasks and automation makes it a breeze to manage routine communications across several platforms (social, email, web). However, the access to detailed customer data for targeting and business analytics can increase productivity by 140% according to Nucleus Research.

In other words, Marketing and Sales should by no means be working as two separate departments, with two separate agendas, but working as one, with one set of rules to achieve the key goal of the company – to increase revenues.