Creating awareness and helping generate leads always will be some of the key roles of the Marketing Department.
The challenge is to make sure Marketing gears its efforts toward reaching the right prospects and customers.
During my time in Marketing positions, I found that Sales would doubt the work the Marketing Department was doing and vice versa. Certainly there is nothing new with this, as Sales and Marketing always have had their share of battles.
During these conversations, I would dig deeper to understand the battle, and I would find each side struggled to define the customer.
When I worked in Marketing, our work was targeting one core type of customer, but under that core, there was a wide number of customer segments, and each had different needs.
We worked on the front-end to segment prospects/customers, and in turn that drove our messaging. Sales, on the other hand, viewed each prospect/customer the same and only began to segment them as they moved them through the sales process.
The result of this confusion about the prospect/customer resulted in a lower close ratio and certainly a lower average sale than we should have been achieving. The reason was simple – the salesperson wasn’t able to fully dissect the needs of the customer, despite how much they believed in their selling skills.
The answer to the opportunity was for those of us in Marketing to target our message in such a way that the leads/prospects were further segmented by the time Sales began working them.
The positive result was Sales more frequently started with leads and prospects that were more tailored, allowing them to build on the needs of the customer earlier in the selling process.
The outcome was pretty clear. We increased our percentage of prospects who became customers, as well as increased the average sale.
The lesson from this experience is Marketing cannot hold back in how they approach the market. The more they can segment the market and the leads, the better Sales can understand the prospect’s needs.
This ultimately increases success for both Marketing and Sales.
Copyright 2016, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price.
