your biggest marketing resource may be in your office:
Chances are if you work in marketing, you don't have the nicest words to describe your counterparts in sales. Often times, sales and marketing teams are at odds with each other. Marketers often think sales people are simple minded and have a single goal while on the other hand sales people describe marketers as too intellectual with no idea what the final goal is.
However, these misconceptions are precisely that, misconceptions. The truth is, both marketing and sales are (or should be...) trying to achieve the same end goal for the company: increased revenue. As a marketer, your biggest resource for building buyer personas (one of the most important parts of Inbound Marketing) is probably right in front of you. It's your sales team and if you're not using them, you're missing out.
smarketing - The marriage of marketing and sales
You'll have to put aside your pride as a marketer if you'd like to take the first step, but it's easier than you think. Send an email to your sales head, or maybe another colleague in sales that you can stand to be around, and initiate a meeting. Whew, the tough part is done...
The next part is the easier part - forming the bond between sales and marketing (smarketing...) to achieve common goals. Remember, you're both a part of your company to achieve the same thing and that's increased revenue. If you're not working together, you're not working optimally and that needs to change.
The sooner each team recognizes the value in the other, the sooner you can form a more successful relationship and take the first step towards much greater teamwork and efficiency. I'll tell you why and how sales can be your best friend in one of the more difficult parts of marketing: knowing your audience.
smarketing and buyer personas
If you're practicing Inbound Marketing, you know how important buyer personas are to the process. If you're not, you can still recognize the importance of knowing who you are selling to. How would you target pain points? How would you focus your efforts at the goals and challenges of your potential customer if you don't know who it is your selling to?
The answer is you wouldn't. It cannot be overstated how important buyer personas are to marketing in general and smarketing is the key to successful personas. Think about it, your sales people talk to leads. They know who they are, they know their frustrations, goals and challenges by heart - all things that are so important to building accurate personas. The more accurate your personas, the more success you're going to have in attracting visitors, turning those visitors into leads, and turning those leads into customers.
So during your persona research phase, don't forget to create another survey or questionnaire specifically for your sales team. Have them fill it out and see how it compares to other market research you do. Doing so will help you paint a better picture of your target customer.
perfection comes with patience
The process of bringing your marketing and sales team together to work as one does not happen overnight. I would suggest setting a regular time to meet. Then, at your meetings talk about the wants/needs/goals/challenges of current and past customers to decided what your marketing strategy should be going forward.
This takes time. Learning to respect and find value in each others' roles is a process. However, if you learn to marry sales and marketing (smarketing) you'll find that overtime you're marketing efforts will be more fruitful and the value you add to customers will be greater.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to check out these other great articles from our blog!
Also, if you're interested in getting more leads from your website, you should look into Growth Driven Design. Click below to download our Guide to Growth Driven web design.
