Your salespeople are perfectly positioned for funnelling accurate intel about your customers’ pain points straight into your marketing engine. With every sales conversation, they:
- Gain a deeper understanding of your customer’s behaviour
- Learn what’s driving the market, and
- Stumble on opportunities out there that you can capitalize on
Yet who do you look to for market research?
Salespeople know your customer best
We preach that a good salesperson is one that actively listens.
Understanding the customer enables your reps to build relationships and increase their chances of closing a deal. This position lets them open the customer up to the prospect of change, and paint a picture of how this change will benefit them.
Then, they receive feedback as to the value of your offerings, and using insights, turn this into the value proposition that they present to future customers. Ultimately, your salespeople are the source of what solution your customers need both now, and in the future.
Your sales team’s cynical view:
Sales teams are out in the field collecting real-time data on your target market. Occupying this position can lead to a cynical view of their close friend: the marketing department. Sales reps often think that marketing teams are “detached from reality”, champing at the bit to attach your message to the latest “trending topic”.
They summise their role as: casting rhetoric out into the wind, collecting clicks and contact information, all for the purpose of sending a steady stream of vaguely interesting subject matter that’s supposed to turn prospects into willing customers, but instead leads to *click unsubscribe*.
You might be thinking at this point that sales kind of have a point: does your value proposition fit the target market’s challenges? Can your solution help them to mitigate a risk? Will it help them to release a potential benefit? Is there a disconnect?
What sales and marketing are saying about each other
Research tells us that as much as 90% of marketing materials are never used, and that sales teams spend far too much of their time creating or repurposing collateral. If you ask your marketing folk why, they’ll tell you that sales reps don’t understand how demand generation works or that attribution data isn’t accurate and, without them, 50% of your customers would have never even heard of you. Your sales team’s rebuttal is equally predictable: that they receive too few and low-quality unqualified leads that waste their time.
We realize this is painting a dramatically hostile picture, but when was the last time your sales and marketing teams invited each other to workshop ideas? To collaborate and gain their insights at the coalface? More to the point: what percentage of your marketing spend is on research that you can most likely mine from your own salespeople?
When sales and marketing collide
The highest performing companies create a virtuous circle by gathering insight from sales in real-time and using this to fuel the next campaign whilst it’s still timely.
Their sales teams benefit because they are invested in the generation of better qualified leads for which they already have a solution to offer. Their marketing teams can finally stop defending their position with explanations about poor attribution or poor sales follow up because they are acting at the behest of sales insights – they are finally working in concert.
Sales leaders benefit because using real-time data points to drive strategy allows for course correction – failing faster means you can rectify mistakes quickly, instead of waiting months to see if your net promoter score is going up or down.
Ultimately, all the mar-tech in the world will not help you if you target the wrong message at the wrong audience, you simply need to join up the dots between sales and marketing to get it right.
