Are you struggling to close deals and losing customers to your competitors? The reason could be that your sales and marketing efforts are not fully integrated.
In today’s world, buyers of your product or service make purchasing decisions differently than ever before and they expect a seamless and consistent experience across all touchpoints.
Without a cohesive approach, you risk losing customers to your competitors.
Learn how the collaboration between marketing and sales teams can enhance the customer buying journey and drive sales.
Why Sales and Marketing Integration is Crucial for Customer Acquisition
Sales and marketing efforts at your company can no longer just be aligned, they must be fully integrated.
If they are not working together at each step of the process, then you are likely losing customers to your competitors.
Marketing teams and sales teams need to work collaboratively to add prospects to a buying funnel and nurture them through the funnel.
The traditional approach of marketing and sales teams working in silos is no longer effective, as customers expect a seamless and consistent experience across all touchpoints.
In this article, we will explore how you can integrate your sales and marketing teams to improve your customer’s buying journey and increase your sales.
Developing Buyer Personas: The Foundation of Successful Integration
The first step in this process is to collaboratively develop buyer personas to understand purchase behaviors.
Adele Revella’s approach to conducting buyer interviews, “The Five Rings of Buying Insight,” is an excellent way to gain insight into your customer’s buying process.
However, it is crucial to ensure that the interviewer can bring the perspective of both a marketer and a salesperson to get accurate and complete information.
With the input and exploration of the sales team during the buyer interview process, both teams are able to uncover further details of the customer triggers and issues that were impacting and lengthening the buying process.
Unveiling Complex Sales Processes: Bridging Communication Gaps
At a recent client engagement, we discovered that their complex, multi-step sales process was not being fully communicated up front, leading to confusion and lost trust.
Even worse, the people who would be impacted by the decision, outside of the key decision-making group, began to lose trust as they were not fully briefed on the status of the project and the potential outcomes.
Our team led the buyer interview process and provided the client with powerful insights that helped both the marketing and sales teams uncover critical details, including customer triggers and obstacles that lengthened the buying process.
Building Trust and Collaboration: Triggering Informational Emails
The marketing team collaborated with the sales leaders to develop updated materials and a messaging campaign that triggered early in the sales process to educate the prospect and allowed them to share important information with stakeholders who may not be part of the sales process.
By triggering informational emails during each step of the sales process to decision-makers and those impacted by the decision, we were able to build trust and create a more collaborative situation, which sped up the sales cycle and grew revenue.
This approach to buyer interviews is different from the standard approach of creating personas based on age, gender, education, etc.
Instead, it focuses on understanding the buyer’s perspective and the factors that influence their decision-making process, which can be used to create more effective marketing and sales strategies.
These buying factors include how prospects compare companies and products during a sales process.
We have found that in many cases, companies exploring a solution do not have an organized approach for comparing offerings. This led to emotional decisions versus clear understanding which product or service offers the best solution and value.
A recent set of interviews demonstrated how potential clients were confused on how to best compare offerings.
The company was undervalued because of the offer they were selling. We created with the sales team a features and benefits checklist that showed the key items of the offering and checked all of the boxes for our product.
We left additional columns for the potential client to add other companies. We knew the features we picked for the checklist were more complete than the competitors and would clearly show the superiority of the product.
This allowed us to provide a valuable tool to the prospect and turn the conversation to the value we could provide.
The Power of Understanding the Buyer’s Journey
Understanding the buyer’s journey goes beyond standard demographic personas. Delving into the details of the buyer’s purchase process allows both sales and marketing teams gain deeper insights.
This buyer-centric approach empowers businesses to understand their customers’ needs and motivations, leading to more effective marketing and sales strategies.
If prospecting and closing new deals is a challenge, understanding your customer and their buying process is essential to succeed in today’s competitive market.
Start with the target customer and listen to them.
Jay Gordman
yorCMO Co-Founder & CMO
Jay Gordman is a successful 20+ year marketing professional helping companies across multiple industries grow revenue and profits using a broad range of marketing and sales strategies.
