Over the years we have found that many of the professional services we engage with in the IT and Telecommunications sectors often struggle with integrating their sales team and marketing strategy. Both can be highly effective for generating sales for the business, but it takes aligning the two to maximise its ROI. Marketing needs to generate quality leads and sales needs the resources to ensure they can support the incoming leads. In the end, as the business owner, you need visibility — data that will allow you to lead continual improvements across all business systems.
The effects on a business can be detrimental:
- 43% of CEOs say that misalignment has cost them sales.
- Misalignment will cause an increase of 43% deals lost.
- Lack of nurturing will lead to 79% of deals lost.
- 60-70% of B2B content will be irrelevant to buyers.
So, how can we create this alignment between sales and marketing? It takes two things — An over-arching Strategy and a System to maintain the customer experience.
The Strategy is made up of three key components which take both Sales and marketing sitting together.
- Ask your marketing and sales team to create a Buyer Persona together (No more than three). Clearly identifying what a right fit customer looks like, the reason these types of customers are of value to the business and reinforce it with industry research.
- Document content gaps and automation along a Buyer’s Journey. Look at your content across your multi-channel marketing strategy including social media, white papers, infographics, e-books, case studies, and email streams. Ensure that the content aligns to connecting to the customer type in the persona and that Sales is across what is going out so that they can leverage it on calls with customers.
- Be customer-centric with your language. Remember you are not the customer. We often get caught writing what we think is important or focusing too much on products or services. You want to position your content around solutions. In the end, the customer just wants to know if it’s going to fix their problem, you are the professional. Build that authority through your content and a customer will take your lead, knowing you are a right fit for the issue they are having.
To maintain a consistent customer experience in every interaction with your brand the System is integral. How do you keep track of every interaction your customer has with your company?
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