Six Ways Marketing Supports a Sales Team

Selling is a tough job. It requires commitment, knowledge, charm, and the ability to think on your toes. Fortunately for the sales team, the marketing team has their back, because the major purpose of any marketing department is to generate possible sales, create selling tools, and support the sales team. In fact, there are six main ways that marketing can support sales, and today’s conversation will be all about those six key points.

Each stage of the sales funnel is perfectly complemented by an inbound marketing approach. 

1. Writing a Sales Synopsis

For each product you sell, the marketing team should create short—no more than 30-second—ads that salespeople can use to start each conversation with a prospect. These ads should include key information the buyers need to know, including the company name, the type of business, and a few pain points that your product or service has resolved for previous customers. The pitch should always end with a question that engages the prospect in conversation.

2. Creating Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are arguably the most important way that marketing can help sales, because personas provide you with invaluable insight into the needs, wants, and behaviors of your prospects. Personas, which are stylized representations of your best customers, are like treasure maps marked with an X—they tell you exactly who and where your customers are and also provide details about what makes them tick. In fact, a good buyer persona will be so detailed that it can even tell your sales team what kind of language to use with specific customers.

Developing an ideal persona is a key piece to any effective digital marketing strategy.  

3. Calculating Value

One of the first things that any potential customer will do is determine whether your product or service is worth the cost. You can help increase sales by doing this for the prospect. And by providing the sales team with a breakdown of the cost-versus-value of the product or service you're offering, where the value is the way the product improves life, solves a problem, or could otherwise be indispensable.

4. Anticipating Pain Points

In order to calculate the value of your product on behalf of potential customers, it’s important to understand their challenges, frustrations, and pain points, so that you can explain exactly how your product or service can provide solutions. This is where your buyer personas come in handy because you'll have a good understanding of each customer and the specific ways your product can help them. These are the pain points you can include in the 30-second sales pitch that starts each conversation.

5. Predicting Likely Objections

Similarly, it’s important that your sales team be prepared for possible objections, so that they can be armed with precise responses. After the first few sales calls, the marketing team should get together and discuss the most common objections that have been raised, and generate responses the sales team can use to quell the protests. Otherwise, the sales team could be caught off guard by objections, won’t be able to recover, and will lose the prospect.

6. Creating Aids Not Crutches

When engaging with potential customers, a scripted and polished pitch will sound exactly like a scripted and polished pitch, and customers will simply walk away. People don’t like having things sold to them, so it’s important that the marketing team refrain from providing exact scripts, and instead provide the sales team with all the resources necessary to create their own informed but natural dialogues to help direct two-way conversations.

Sales and marketing teams are two hands on the same body, so it’s integral that they work together to achieve their mutual goals. There are many ways that marketing can and should support the sales team, and these six are among the most important because they involve providing sales with all the tools, knowledge, and resources necessary to sell effectively to a range of prospects.

 In order to convince management of the advantage of an inbound marketing approach, you’ll need to understand the facts and figures that will impress them most. Get your free copy of our eGuide, The Six Marketing Metrics Your Boss Actually Cares About, and start making your case today.

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