Sales & Marketing are the Ultimate BFFs: Here’s Why 

Many think marketing and sales don’t go hand-in-hand! Are you one of them? Let us tell you that you have a wrong impression. The unison of these two concepts is unavoidable if you want to work wonders for your B2B business. This blog will help you understand how marketing and sales make the best of friends and work together to facilitate tangible business outcomes. 

Some interesting statistics to note: Sales and marketing collaboration

• 1. 87% of sales and marketing leaders agree that sales and marketing collaboration leads to business growth. 
• 2. 22.1% of salespeople claim that alignment with marketing helped them close more deals. 

• 3. Companies that align sales and marketing are 15% more profitable than others. 
• 4. Organizations whose sales and marketing have a strong relationship experience a 36% higher retention rate. 
• 5. Companies with highly aligned marketing and sales achieved a 32% year-over-year revenue growth. 

Marketing + Sales: The Perfect Match

You want to create a cohesive customer experience, right? Can you do it with your marketing and sales teams working in silos? The answer is NO. 

Conventionally, you might think of sales and marketing as separate entities. But, remember, they are always meant to be intertwined. With marketing, you generate awareness about your product/service. And sales initiatives help convert that awareness into a customer purchase. 

Simple. 

B2B e-commerce example: Understanding sales and marketing alignment 

Let’s say you are an e-commerce company whose marketing and sales efforts are not aligned. Your marketing team has created a stellar campaign for a new product. However, your sales team has no clue about the campaign message, the audience you’re targeting, or the USP of the product. Result? The sales might reach out to the wrong set of potential customers and the campaign could be a total flop. 

Now imagine that marketing and sales share the best bond within your organization. Your marketing group shares everything about their upcoming campaign with sales reps – potential customer details, campaign intent, and other critical facts. The sales team listens carefully and shares feedback and suggestions for enhancing the campaign. They know best what audiences might want to hear or gain.  Then, based on the product positioning established by marketing, the sales team will engage with potential customers and close deals. 

How marketing strategies power sales?

What does sales need to support their pitch during calls? Quality collateral and an already existing, well-established brand awareness and positioning. Who do you think can make all this possible? Yes, you guessed it right! Marketing. 

Marketing can speed up and simplify the customer/buyer journey. Here’s how: 

1. Push Marketing 

Push marketing, popularly known as outbound marketing, is one of the best ways marketing can help sales. This is your traditional marketing approach. Examples include cold emailing, tradeshow demos, TV/radio/LinkedIn ads, and more. You get your brand out in the market and level up your brand visibility. A broader audience knows that there’s a solution to their problems in the form of your product and service. This way, you don’t directly reach customers, but they find you. Interesting, isn’t it? 

Outbound marketing helps identify potential customers. Marketing can pass on this information to sales. Sales will then have a defined list of prospects they need to engage and convert into customers. This will save them a lot of time as they’ll exactly know who to connect with.

2. Inbound Marketing 

Another way marketing can help sales is inbound marketing. It is a strategic marketing approach that helps attract and engage your potential customers. Examples include blogs, ebooks, SEO, PPC, and social media. Simply put, marketing implements inbound marketing to help sales nurture leads. How? Well, when inbound marketing is solid, your sales representatives get empowered. They have information and resources to present at each stage of their buying journey. 

3. Competitor analysis 

Marketing can perform detailed market research and prepare a competition comparative analysis. This analysis can help gain insights into what the competition is doing, what is their product/service, how they are offering customer support and more. All this information can help highlight what you are doing differently compared to your competitors. 

For example, after the analysis, marketing may find out that none of your competition is using chatbots for customer engagement and support, and offer customer service only during business hours. However, your brand has a chatbot that can answer customer queries 24/7 and guide them throughout their purchase journey. Interesting, isn’t it? This can be one of your USPs. Marketing can forward this to sales and they can use it to differentiate your brand during conversations with prospects. 

How sales powers marketing?

There is one very evident advantage that sales has but marketing doesn’t – one-on-one conversation with prospects! Sales can use this power to help marketing improve their initiatives. Wondering how? Let us explain. 

When potential buyers engage with sales reps over calls and start developing interest in your product/service, they might have different questions related to your brand like pricing structure, post-purchase support, best features, expected ROI, and more.

Well, we are sure that all of these questions are important. However, there must be a set of repeated questions that sales receives from potential customers. They can forward this particular list of questions to the marketing people. How will marketing leverage this list? 

Marketing can build meaningful assets like a dedicated FAQ page on the website, feature-specific product/service pages, demos that explain the process you follow while delivering services, and others. This will help marketing improve the ways they facilitate brand positioning and craft better marketing campaigns. They can prepare resources having answers to questions that your potential customers might ask in the future. When your audiences interact with such assets, it, certainly, creates a very good brand impression. 

Enhance your brand with the best B2B sales and digital marketing company in India 

With more than two decades of global sales, BD, and marketing experience in various sectors across different countries including the US, Europe, the Middle East, & Asia – DealsInsight can be your preferred B2B sales and digital marketing company. We cater to businesses across industries like Information Technology, Oil & Gas, Renewable Energy, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Entertainment, Construction & Real estate, Food & Beverages, Healthcare, Hospitality, Education, and Pharma. 

Ready to take your business to the next level? Get in touch today.