Sales and Marketing: What They Both Need to Learn

What Marketers Need to Know About Sales and Vice-Versa

When you have both your sales and marketing teams working together, you will know about it! Unfortunately, this is not always the case. More often than not, sales teams and marketing teams ignore one another and do not appreciate the value which each bring to the overall business.

After all, both teams are part of the same corporation and are on the same side, so both teams should be working together because they both share the same end goal. The extent to which these two teams will work together depends on an individual company, but there are some key things which marketing teams need to know about sales, and vice-versa.

Mutual respect between sales and marketing teams is critical, because sales and marketing go hand-in-hand. Without the sales team, there would be no point marketing the product and without the marketing team, you would not sell as many products.

What Marketers Need to Know About Sales

1. Selling things is no easy task. If you have never been part of a sales team, you will not be able to fully appreciate everything that goes into the work of a salesperson. Selling products is a very personal undertaking which requires high levels of trust from clients and customers, lots of promises and guarantees about the product that is being sold.
2. The length of sales cycles can vary greatly, and this can have a resonating effect on your potential marketing strategies. Marketing teams must know just how long the sales cycle for an individual product is; if it takes clients six months to buy your brand’s product, then a single product demonstration or short trial period is not going to help close a deal.
3. How your customers like to communicate is key. Do they like to meet in person, or prefer telephone calls? Do they like to send messages via email or have video conferences on Skype? Marketers need to know this so that they can tweak marketing leads to satisfy customers across a whole range of communication methods, rather than just focusing on one.
4. Marketing resources are best focussed where previous marketing methods have gained the company its most leads, and this is where the sales team can help you. The sales team can help you understand which products were selling well, when and how long for. By understanding this, marketers can focus the company’s marketing resources where it is likely to get the highest return on investment.
5. Sales teams use your marketing resources and depend on them to generate leads, so a marketer needs to understand which of these they use most frequently. When you are producing marketing materials, keep in mind that the sales team can also use them to generate leads and additional sales. By knowing which materials the sales team uses most regularly, you can tailor future marketing content to help the sales team in their efforts.

What Salespeople Need to Know About Marketing

1. Behind all great and compelling marketing campaigns is a story to be told. Clever marketing campaigns tell stories which are emotive and memorable, which cause consumers to confidently make purchasing decisions. Great marketing campaigns go down in the history books and are stories which are told and re-told throughout generations. Apple encouraged us to Think Different and showed us what could be shot on an iPhone, whereas Patagonia campaigned to save Bears Ears National Monument.
2. When marketing is done correctly, it makes the job of a salesperson a whole lot easier. A great marketer can be a salesperson’s wingman or wingwoman, and their marketing campaigns have connected with a large number of your company’s potential customers long before you have made your sales pitch. In fact, it may be your company’s marketing campaign which has encouraged the person to whom you are pitching to reach out and connect with you in the first place. We are not saying that your job is easier than a marketer’s, rather, we are saying that a good marketing campaign which precedes your conversation with a potential customer will have already endeared that person.
3. People buy into emotion, and marketing provides plenty of this. A great marketing campaign can tug on the heartstrings of millions of consumers (just look at UK department store John Lewis and their annual Christmas commercial for an idea) and marketing plays a key role in helping potential customers make an emotional connection with the company, its brand and the product which you are ultimately attempting to sell.
4. It is not all about modern marketing campaigns on social media; email marketing still remains a powerful tool which you should use to your advantage. Marketers understand the importance of email marketing and you should too. Most people in our digitally connected world are constantly within arm’s reach of their smartphone and, as soon as that notification alert goes off, that smartphone is picked up and the email is read. By working closely with your marketing team, you can work to produce an email marketing and sales campaign which can connect you with people to whom you may never have been exposed.
5. Marketing helps potential customers get to know your company, decide whether they like your product and seriously consider whether or not to make a purchase, all before you have even spoken to them. Before you can make a sale to a potential customer, that person needs to know and trust the brand, the product and the company. This is why marketing is so crucial; it prevents the need to make hard-sales which can alienate potential customers and damage your company’s reputation.

One thing which both marketing and sales teams need to realize is that they need each other; each team cannot do its job effectively without being supported and backed-up by the other. Working together is much more powerful than working against each other and, without marketing, being a salesperson would be a whole lot harder.

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