You shouldn’t be surprised if your marketing department knows just as much as you do about sales. Marketers don’t just hide behind their marketing automation platform and press buttons to execute generic, robotic campaigns. Top performing marketers know what it takes to sell and are continuously honing their own skills to enable you and your team to perform better.
Let’s take a look at 5 things your sales leader needs to know about your marketing department. This will help them to empower you to increase your sales effectiveness and performance.
1. Pay Attention to the Way You Use Your CRM
Different companies approach the use of their CRM in different ways. Some populate their database with a list of contacts with basic personal information and demographic data. Some take it a step further: they keep records of each touchpoint throughout their customer journey. According to Salesforce, CRM increases sales by up to 29%. Top performing marketers know this. That’s why they stress the importance of using the CRM to its full ability; the more information on each contact, the more segmented are the buyers and the more targeted are the marketing messages.
2. Have Patience
Marketing is doing everything they can to produce the most sales-ready leads. They are implementing the kind of campaigns that work to generate demand through capabilities like lead nurturing and lead scoring. Your boss needs to understand that the marketing department is working to the best of their ability to produce seasoned leads for your team. Have patience. Marketing isn’t only trying to produce results in the boardroom for themselves – their success largely depends on how well you do.
3. Speak the Same Language
From prospect, to marketing-qualified lead, to sales-qualified lead and customer, both you and the marketing department need to have agreed-upon sets of definitions for each stage of the sales cycle. When the two departments are speaking the same language, they are inadvertently aligned in their activities, and tightly aligned marketing and sales teams enjoy 36% higher customer retention rate and 38% higher win rates. Marketing needs to make sure that you understand why a lead is being passed off to your team at the exact moment that it is so they can take over the reins.
4. Trust Them
Marketing knows that sales reps with rich content enjoy a competitive advantage over those that do not. It’s important for sales to understand that marketing is continuously crafting more and more targeted and dynamic messages. Because 80% of the buyer’s research occurs before the meeting actually occurs, marketing knows all too well that they hold in their hands your ability to sell. Trust them. They are taking care of the marketing process. You take care of closing the deal.
5. Bring Back Data!
Here is the final piece of the puzzle – bring back data! While on sales call, you have the ability to gather even more customer information with your sales tool. Bring this information back to marketing. They need it. Make their job easier!
Simplify the lives of your marketing people. Keep communication lines open with your boss to ensure they understand how to improve the performance of the marketing team so that sales performs even better.
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