When you are focused on increasing your revenue, it is absolutely essential that your sales team works closely with your marketing people.
Organizing a business is hard, especially as you scale – as I said to Karen Rands recently on her Compassionate Capitalist podcast. It’s easy to separate departments and functions and before you realize it critical lines of collaboration have been blocked or even cut.
Fight for cross-functional collaboration at all costs! Marketing is there to deliver broad brand awareness – but how can you know what to say to your prospective customers unless you are getting opinions from real prospects?
When sales teams talk to prospective clients they should be delivering a consistent message to drive conversion. But they should be listening too.
Marketing is all about finding the ideal customer profile, the mythical one perfect customer that you want to walk through your door 10,000 times.
Sales, meanwhile, is about having 10,000 different conversations that enable you to build up that picture of your customers. If the two areas do not work together, you are in trouble.
Ultimately, salespeople just want to make a sale and if they will say anything to do that, it’s bad for the company.
Operations will have problems delivering, the finance side will come under pressure, you will have customized billing terms on every contract – in short, it is a disaster.
If, however, you integrate those systems where money flows into the company, does that not make everybody a lot happier?
Information should flow up and down your sales funnel. The top of the funnel should be informed by what is happening on each sales call, and each of those calls should be enhanced by what’s coming down through the marketing system.
If you are able to put that all together, you can create a system where different areas work smoothly together – operations, customer success, delivery and finance. What makes a successful business is the execution – not the idea.
One of the core benefits that Add1Zero brings to a customer is that we record every call and make note of every question and every objection.
We break down every objection, we catalogue them, and over time we turn that information into a database.
We can now tell our client everything prospects want to know, including why they are buying, and why they are not buying. This is not a research study; it is in the context of a revenue system whereby we are trying to drive prospects to happily buy.
The result is that our clients know every question their prospects want to know the answer to when they are talking to the sales team.
We can use that to identify the most important issues and feed that information back to the top of the funnel, because those are the content prompts around which you can build your marketing.
Now you can educate potential customers by and through your marketing, giving them the answers to the questions your research tells you they will ask most often.
If those people then show up for a sales call already educated about the services and products you provide, the percentage of calls that you can close with a sale goes up.
This is a system that we have built over the years and we are able to bring it to any business we work with.