Are You Asking Too Much Of Your Sales Team?

Well, actually, the real question is: Are you asking your sales team to do the job your marketing should be doing?

Good quality marketing finds those who are the right fit for your products and services.

It addresses the needs of the customer, provides solutions and answers any questions or objections they may have.

And if all of this happens before the customer makes contact with your company directly, the need to sell is dramatically reduced, if not removed almost entirely.

When this happens, your sales team can focus more on providing service, expertise and creating customer success. When they don’t have to ‘convince’ the customer to participate in the first place, they can ensure the sale that is made is fully qualified. They can ensure complimentary products and services are offered. And they can ensure the customer knows how to make the most of their purchase so they continue to remain your customer, or deepen their relationship with you, over time.

If you operate a business where you don’t have salespeople, you can still benefit from marketing doing the heavy lifting upfront. In this case, your website and content will typically do the selling for you. But if unqualified leads hit your site, or visitors don’t resonate with what they see when they arrive, your bounce rates and conversions will suffer. While there are numerous reasons for this, an excellent first step is always to assess the quality of your marketing efforts to ensure the right fits are happening in the initial phases of the customer journey.

But back to companies with a sales team. If you’re expecting your sales department to warm up super cold leads, you’re not taking advantage of your marketing enough to do that job for you. You’re also wasting the talents of your sales people and potentially demoralizing them in the process. So unless you want to utilize a shotgun, cold call type approach, we highly suggest refining your marketing efforts until they can find the right customer types for you and prime them to be ready to buy before they ever speak to a human at your company.

The role of good marketing is to bring qualified leads to the table so your sales team can nourish them to fruition, not spend their energy convincing the customer to even sit down at the table.

Is marketing serving your needs this way?

If not, or you’re not sure, we can help you diagnose your current strategies and refine until you’ve got this down pat. Give us a call today!