What every marketer seems to forget… keeping your sales force in the loop.
With prospects and customers I have seen over the years through both sales calls and marketing system implementations, there is almost always one obvious and systemic problem: The lack of coordinated, tactically enabled, communication between marketing and sales.
Typical coordination between marketing and sales
A cliché statement for sure, as certainly every marketer I have known has either books on their office shelf that address this topic or can easily quote the top three reasons for doing so. Regardless if the books are read or not, what I actually see happening tells the story.
What most marketers don’t know is that the tools to bridge this gap are right at their fingers, it doesn’t have to be painful at all, and the potential insights are boundless.
Connecting Marketing and Sales:
What every marketer ends up learning in the field, not in the classroom, is that as part of each and every campaign, the goals/intentions/purpose/and results need to be communicated to the rest of the team, related/interested executives, partners, and most importantly, their eyes and ears on the ground, the sales force. What often is the first thing to drop from the project plan when times get tight and schedules get full? You guessed it.
One of my most favorite sales manager mentors once told me (in very grizzled/seasoned voice):
“If marketing and sales were on the same side of World War II, it would be the job of marketing to leap upon the enemy’s barbed wire, and for the sales team to jump over and make the kill.”
In this analogy, what if marketing forgot to mention to sales that they were going to jump on “that particular” piece of barbed wired today, or worse yet, that they weren’t going to make it to do their job at all? The fact is that “demand creation”, the ultimate goal of the marketer organization, is just that, to lessen the burden on the sale force through informed marketing campaigns that enlighten, inform, and educate, not only the customer, but the sales rep as well.
Planning an upcoming webinar? The sales force should know… About to send out the newest newsletter? The sales force should know… Want to send out the result summary of your latest trade show? Better test it out with the sales force first… (they probably were there too right?!)
People tend to caw about the marginalization of the sales force with new digital mediums, restricted access doctors, regulations, etc. The fact is that now, and for the foreseeable future, they are the face of your company, they own the relationship with your top customers, and they need the sharpest tools and the most intel out of any channels available to your fingertips. Correctly enabled, they are still your most effectual arm, without it, the most dangerous weakness you could have.
The GREAT news is that what sounds like a cumbersome, heavy process is actually not!
First, make it your business practice to keep the sales force in the loop. Second, make it simple for your marketing department and colleagues. Lots of tools exist. Our tool, Appature NexusSM, is an HCP relationship marketing platform that can be integrated and loaded with your sales reps (or other internal contacts like Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) to appear as actual actionable contact records available for segmentation, insight, and action. Why call out what seems to be such a simple (maybe obvious) thing? To enable you with the paradigm that you can turn the tools that you have refined greatly, typically used for customer communication, and point them towards your internal sales force, taking full advantage of the knowledge and relationship afforded through digital mediums.
● Did your sales reps actually open and read your latest communication?
● What did they think of it?
● Do they perceive it will help create demand with targets, or simply will be a waste of time?
Sending your sales force a survey, a pre-communication email, a post event warning message, through your marketing platform can afford you great insight into the demand generation process.
Keeping a strong bridge between marketing and sales
Your sales force team is the eyes and ears, hands and feet, of your marketing efforts. Treat them as customers, both in the respect of pre/post-event knowledge sharing, and also through the usage of digital tools to gain insight or build relationship.
What tactics have you used to keep sales reps aware and armed with the most current marketing information?
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