Marketing comes down to this: making the path between salesperson and client into a superhighway. You can dress it up and throw a lot of lingo behind it, but that is what you are essentially doing. You are providing the necessary ingredients for a successful sale. Your primary goal is to create conversions that you measure in levels of interest. A marketer plants the seeds and gardens, while the sales person harvests the client/product sale.
If this is the case, why do some companies put such a divider up between the two departments of thought. When I began working for BCC Research the smartest thing that my Marketing Director did was seat me on the sales floor.
I learned product, listened to sales complaints, and generally was able to establish a repoir with the sales people that sold our product. A few things happened as a result: I learned the product line, I saw what made a successful sale possible, and I saw that the best way I could help the company was to make the salesperson's life as easy as possible.
By not being siloed I was able to market with sales behind everyone of my proposals. I looked out for them and they looked out for me. It is a great system, I wish every company would use it or even consider using it. It cuts down on redundancy, meetings, and a lot of misunderstanding.
Often, marketing and sales don't understand where the other is going. Sales tends to concentrate on the short-term conversions while marketers try to run a more medium to long tail approach on conversions. Thus, it can look to salespeople like marketers aren't really doing anything. I think most of the salespeople I worked with had barely any idea of what I was doing, but that was due to the fact that I was working with SEO and Social Media Outreach.
Sales should work with marketing everyday to try and solve eachother's problems. While this may not work on a large scale, at a minimum your sales director and marketing director should be having daily meetings. I've seen to many companies where one hand doesn't know what the other is doing and sometimes the client (and your wallet) are the ones that end up suffering for your company's negligence.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment, showing us some social love or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.
tagged as ignorance, long-tail, Marketing, marketing communication, rockem sockem, sales, sales marketing, SEO, Social Media
