Does your company also have a separate marketing department and sales department? If so, do you also recognize the love-hate relationship that often exists between these two departments? The atmosphere there is often even more like water and fire! Marketing accuses sales of not empathizing enough with the target group, the positioning and the customer. In turn, sales accuses the marketing department of placing too little emphasis on lead generation and sales through the marketing channels. The two departments often hardly work together, or worse, work against each other and that does not benefit the result!
Marketing mindset
John Jantsch, a well-known consultant and author, recently published a book titled 'Duct Tape Marketing, The Commitment Engine and The Referral Engine'. In an interview on Forbes, he emphasizes that salespeople should think more with a marketing mindset. They could place more emphasis on ideal customer profiles (instead of simply selling as much as possible), reputation, value proposition, and educating and advising the customer. However, it is not only salespeople who need to change their mindset. The marketing department must also learn to think more from a sales perspective! This means placing more emphasis on concrete CTAs in marketing messages and on sustainable relationships with customers and leads, rather than purely conveying the marketing message to a large group.
Does your company also have a separate marketing department and sales department? If so, do you also recognize the love-hate relationship that often exists between these two departments? The atmosphere there is often even more like water and fire! Marketing accuses sales of not empathizing enough with the target group, the positioning and the customer. In turn, sales accuses the marketing department of placing too little emphasis on lead generation and sales through the marketing channels. The two departments often hardly work together, or worse, work against each other and that does not benefit the result!
Example from my own kitchen
At Kenneth Smit, we have experienced firsthand that a well-oiled collaboration between marketing and sales activities can create added value. A good example of this is the use of social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Marketers often say that social media channels cannot be directly measured by sales and should primarily be used to reach and connect with the target audience. However, practice shows us otherwise! By providing strong, substantive content that the target audience truly benefits from (marketing mindset), and building social media networks and relationships (sales mindset), we see an increase in the number of leads for our training courses.
The most important thing is to link the two goals and allow them to support each other. Writing catchy and informative content is really a task for marketers, you can leave it to them. After all, it is their job! However, in the end conversion must be achieved that the sales people can take advantage of... right? In short, through targeted content that really helps your target group, you make it clear what your company can do. They are then guided through your company's offering, resulting in completed application forms and contacts. In this way, the circle is almost complete and marketing and sales work together to increase the number of high-quality leads. The sales department then has the task of connecting their relations to your company's social media network, to complete the circle completely.
Merge everything that was good into something better!
And we are not the only ones leveraging the effect of collaboration between sales and marketing! Take Delta Lloyd, for instance, whose primary goal is to grow into one of the top three insurers in the Netherlands and who intends to take significant steps to achieve this. Active in both the private and business markets, the organization is in the process of setting up a new structure. And guess what? In the new organization, sales and marketing are no longer completely separate departments. Under the motto of 'everything that was good has been merged into something better,' they now refer to the Marketing & Sales department. Until recently, Delta Lloyd employed different groups for call center employees, online marketers, staff members, etcetera. Now, everything has been merged with one unifying characteristic: 100% focus on customer interest!
Do you want to know more about marketing and sales? Download the white paper on sales and marketing now.
