Are your marketing campaigns tailored following your customers’ preferences? Do you use your customers’ data to make better, informed decisions?
Sharpen your sales and marketing efforts to reach new markets.
Business owners have recognized the need to constantly adjust their sales and marketing efforts to suit their customers’ behavior. As customers’ behavior changes and the need for online presence increases, companies should understand these changes and use technology to improve their efforts. Creating personalized experiences by putting the customer in the focus increases customers’ satisfaction and ROI.
Sales & Marketing Process Flow
The following diagram depicts the directed flow of activities of the sales and marketing process.
Marketing & Sales in Today’s World
Marketing has become to be a pre-sales activity and it is meant to connect the right customers to the right product. It takes into consideration the customer experience, puts the customer in the center, and strives to tailor its activities in a way that would be helpful for customers. The customers need to know what the product or service does before they make the purchase. Thus, marketing should ensure that customers:
- are properly informed about the product
- receive personalized experience, i.e. every customer is treated individually
- are engaged even after they make the purchase
Marketing ultimately drives sales and grows the business. And just like marketing, sales has the characteristic of being helpful to the customer, i.e. how your product/service can help the customer. Additionally, research has shown that customers need more touchpoint interactions (7 to 10 touching points) before the selling is done, meaning that customers’ time and interaction become of a high value. This is where marketing and sales interconnect and build an inseparable link – content marketing is being widely used as a digital touchpoint. Finally, the one-size-fits-all sales approach doesn’t work anymore and every customer expects personalized treatment.
Having in mind the customers’ changing behavior, the increased online presence, and the increased connection between marketing and sales, it is more than obvious that they should be perfectly aligned and function as one. Marketing should provide consistent messaging, which will support salespeople and the sales process. In order for this to happen, sales and marketing teams should have the same goals, same parameters, and should work towards the same destination. This can be accomplished only if both teams have timely information about the activities that are ongoing in both departments. In cases when there is no connection between these two departments, the result will be sales decline or stagnation, and a waste of efforts and resources. On the other hand, a good alignment between sales and marketing efforts leads to higher win rates and increases customer retention ratio.
The key to ensuring that these two departments are aligned is by using systems and solutions that increase collaboration, communication, and sharing of information. In fact, the system/solution should ensure that both teams have one central place where they would be able to see what’s happening in both departments on daily basis. Having this information in real-time will allow marketing teams to tailor their activities in accordance with sales targeting, and will give sales teams credible material that will support them in the sales process.
Sharpen your sales and marketing efforts to reach new marketing. Our experts can help you create differentiated and scalable sales and marketing activities which enhance customer acquisition. Explore our solutions and let’s connect.