Right up front, let’s state the obvious: Without customers, your company wouldn’t exist. They are the lifeblood that keeps your business running, and sales has the job of bringing in new customers and keeping your company growing. That’s why it’s so important to get the most from your sales team.
One trick to help your sales team succeed is by making sure they’re working closely with marketing. In too many companies, the marketing and sales teams butt heads with each other. But when they work together, they can complement and help each other to bring your customers a positive experience so they’ll stay loyal to your brand.
Find out how marketing can support your sales team and help improve the customer’s experience while increasing conversion rates.
What does sales need from marketing? When your marketing materials support and empower your sales team, they bring in qualified leads and give your sales team more time to focus on customers’ unique needs. Marketing content is an extension of sales and helps lead customers down the funnel.
Here are four ways marketing content supports your sales team.
When marketing works like it ought to, it captures leads that your sales team can follow up on. It’s that simple.
What if your marketing team could automatically qualify leads and put them on the fast track to becoming prospects? To do this right, you need a clear line of communication about standards and qualifications that the sales team requires in leads and prospects. This equips marketing to start the ball rolling so your sales team can focus on converting those prospects.
When your marketing content matches your sales content, it helps to establish a brand. Your brand becomes what your customers expect from you. When both your marketing and sales teams speak with the same voice and style, customers get a recognizable and familiar message throughout their entire journey.
This unified brand voice helps improve sales because it first establishes, then confirms a customer’s expectations regarding your organization. A change in voice or brand styling can make customers feel lost, confused, or even lied to.
Customers can get stuck in the funnel. They run into objections or other problems, and any progress they were making comes to a standstill. This is where marketing has a unique advantage over sales.
Contact from the sales team at this point can feel pushy if done wrong, and you risk losing the lead altogether.
However, a well-crafted piece of content from marketing shared in the right way can be an unobtrusive and even welcome message to give the customer a gentle push toward purchase. No matter where your customers are, marketing can reach them and take them one step closer to closing the sale.
Your sales team would love it if your customers trusted them because it’s easier to sell to people who trust you. But it’s hard to establish that trust and expertise through phone calls, emails, and meetings. Trust is built over time, and that’s where marketing can help.
Marketing is able to establish your brand as an expert in the industry. They’re able to build campaigns that show your brand, and your sales team, as trustworthy. Imagine the power of shifting the conversation from the sales team trying to prove why your company is trustworthy to having customers come to you for help from established experts.
We’ve gone over why marketing is important for your sales team, but how exactly can marketing help sales? Here are a few examples for how your marketing team can bolster your company by supporting sales.
No matter what industry you are in, your prospective customers will raise similar questions. Rather than leaving it up to your sales team to answer them all, your marketing team can provide answers in their content. This will help reduce the number of questions and concerns your sales team has to resolve, and can even help customers start to self-qualify.
An objection is a specific barrier that exists between a customer and the sale. Objections can usually be sorted into four categories: trust, need, urgency, and budget. Your marketing team should have a strategy for addressing each of these objections.
Like we said before, marketing can build trust in your business, which addresses one of the biggest objections. Customers don’t want to buy from a company they don’t know or trust.
By publishing and sharing quality content consistently, you can show that you know what you’re talking about. Content marketing like this takes time, but it provides long-lasting results in establishing a trusted brand image.
Customers won’t buy your product or service if they don’t know why they need it. One of your marketing team’s most important tasks is to build this case for the customer. This helps reduce the amount of time your sales team has to continually explain the value of a product and can help them focus more on the customer.
A lack of urgency usually shows up when customers like your product or service, but they just don’t think it’s a good fit for them right now. This can be a tricky objection to overcome for sales because the customer has already made up their mind that what you are selling isn’t right for them. Luckily, marketing is in a different position and can resolve and address this objection before it even comes up.
If marketing addresses the urgency of why customers need this product now from early on in the customer journey, it’s possible to completely sidestep this objection. The most obvious methods for creating urgency are sales, deals, and limited-time offers. But marketing urgency doesn’t always have to be tied to time or money. Urgency also results if your customers feel that waiting equals missing out. Show them how your offering creates business opportunities, improves quality of life, or solves a frustrating problem.
The marketing team rarely takes the lead on pricing and addressing budget concerns; that’s typically a sales team responsibility. That said, the marketing team can help soften those objections in various ways. For example, marketing content can and should demonstrate the value of a product or service, even if that content doesn’t give price estimates. Marketers can also meet with salespeople regularly to discuss common customer concerns around price and then strategize ways to address those concerns.
Potential customers want to know more about your company, and marketing can make that happen. Through case studies, positive reviews, and customer reviews, marketing can share someone else’s voice about just how great you are.
Personalized content that is built with a specific customer in mind is powerful. It shows customers that they matter to you and can improve conversations, increase conversion rates, and strengthen a relationship between you and your clients.
Working with Tiled makes your marketing content better. The Tiled platform ditches a static sales or marketing experience and replaces it with an engaging platform you can share with your customers. Tiled empowers your customers to navigate freely, enabling them to create a memorable experience for themselves.
Tiled can be used as part of any marketing and sales content campaign. Even email campaigns can be crafted as an engaging and personal experience for your customers.
Tiled microapps update instantaneously any time they are accessed. If you ever need to update your prices or change your product line, your customers can use the same microapp to get accurate information.
Use Tiled microapps as part of your content marketing strategy to better support your sales team. Request your demo today to get started.
