Think for a moment about the level of support your marketing team provides to sales. Perhaps you are not communicating with sales as much as you should; maybe your functions work in silos, each playing their own game.
Success for a B2B organisation cannot come about when marketing and sales are not aligned. Sales needs marketing to provide them with qualified leads to call. When having discussions with prospects, your salespeople need marketing collateral to support the conversation and get closer to a sale.
So, how can marketers ensure they provide adequate support to the sales team?
Commit to sales as your customer
Your sales team needs a list of prospects to call and marketing material, such as content or events, to strengthen their relationship with prospects. So, the marketing team must consider the sales team as their end customer.
One way to ensure you commit to delivering what sales requires is to set deliverables similar to service level agreements (SLAs). These could include the number of leads generated, qualified and delivered to the sales team each month, data on the prospects interacting with content, and the amount of content provided to sales to support conversations with customers.
In turn, the sales team might make some commitments to marketing, such as providing marketing with ideation, helping to increase webinar attendance and contacting leads within a specific time frame.
Deliver content aligned with the sales team’s conversations
When content aligns with salespeople’s conversations, it provides consistent messaging for the prospect from start to finish. Having unified messaging across all channels—from blog posts to website copy to sales conversations—makes it easier for prospects to understand what your product or service brings to the table.
Moreover, having content that aligns with salespeople’s conversations shows prospects that you are knowledgeable and credible in your field. When someone is interested in purchasing a product or service, they want to feel assured that they are working with someone trustworthy and reliable. So marketing can support sales by providing content such as customer success stories, case studies, eBooks and blogs to share with the customer.
Generate warm leads
Marketing teams have an important role in helping sales teams convert warm leads into customers. There are several ways to acquire warm leads, but two common approaches include:
Landing pages are a powerful tool for capturing leads, providing warm prospects with valuable information and delivering prospect information to your salespeople. Your landing pages need strong calls-to-action that communicate the value proposition and contact forms so prospects can provide their details and indicate an interest in further discussion.
Automated nurture campaigns are a powerful tool for marketing teams to drive leads that are more qualified and further along in the buyer’s journey. Marketing and sales departments can target prospective customers with relevant content at the right time. By leveraging automation technology, marketers can create campaigns that nurture leads through the entire funnel, from awareness to conversion. Additionally, automated nurturing campaigns can ensure that leads do not slip through the cracks by tracking each individual’s progress and delivering content at the right moment.
Deliver MQLs to the sales team
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead identified by marketing as having strong potential to become a customer. The metrics for this include someone’s engagement with your brand, such as downloading an asset or commenting on a social media post.
MQLs are usually more likely to purchase from you than cold leads because they have already expressed interest in your product or service and are familiar with your brand.
By leveraging different tools, such as predictive analytics and segmentation, marketers can identify which leads are more likely to convert and provide warm leads to sales alongside valuable insights into the customer’s buying journey. The sales team can use these to focus on the leads most likely to purchase.
Additionally, marketers can use campaigns and other tactics to nurture leads that may not be ready to buy yet but have the potential to become customers in the future. By understanding customer behaviour and providing the sales team with information on each lead’s preferences, marketers can provide the sales team with all the necessary information they need to have more successful conversations.
Conduct competitor analysis
Marketing can be responsible for conducting competitor analysis, which unearths insights into the services they offer, how the company performs and what sets your business apart. You can use this information to identify areas of opportunity or potential threats by considering competitors’ performance in the market. Additionally, by tracking competitor activity, you can identify trends and emerging changes in the market.
You can share insights from competitor analysis with your sales team and empower them with more information on the market and the companies their prospects may be considering. With this information, salespeople can find points to differentiate the company from its competitors and use these to position the business in sales discussions.
Conclusion
B2B marketing is crucial in supporting salespeople and driving revenue growth. By aligning marketing and sales efforts, your business can create a seamless customer journey that builds trust, strengthens relationships, and drives success. A collaborative approach that prioritises open communication and feedback enables B2B marketers and salespeople to work together to achieve their shared goals and drive business success. This, in combination with the strategies mentioned in this blog, gives your marketing team a strong foundation for supporting sales.
How Resonate’s marketing supports your sales team
At Resonate, we are a full-stack B2B marketing firm. We specialise in the B2B sector as that is where our passions lie, and that is what we are good at. If you would like to initiate marketing for your business in 2023, please reach out to us. We are experts in optimising marketing to drive leads and sales and believe in taking a strategic approach to getting the best results. Please visit our Marketing page for more about our services.
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