As simple as it can be quoted, marketing is a science, the business activity that involves finding out what customers want, using that information to design products and services, and selling them effectively. There has been a constant tussle between sales and marketing for ages.
Wealth of Words state correctly:
Marketing point of view
Let's try to understand how the human brain works when it comes to purchasing. We marketers use cognitive bias to captivate and persuade audiences.
Creating a sudden urge, a necessity of a commodity, is the basic principle of marketing. Once we humans put an eye on something, we tend to chase it until we achieve it. But this is the ideal case where sales is followed by marketing immediately. Some get out of this loophole due to distractions.
What it's like to work in a marketing service
A constant effort is needed to structure the entire buying process. Analyzing human behavior, its needs, and separating it from wants has always been the most crucial part.
When it comes to necessities, there is not much marketing required as people have already understood the importance and placed a fair value on it. The actual struggle arises when wants and desires slide in. A collaborative effort of both the marketing and sales team is needed as this becomes a cumbersome task.
Marketing point of view has always been simple and everlasting, i.e believe in what you say and introduce. Marketing finds its foundation in the very fact of firmly believing oneself before convincing the audience.
A coordinated marketing team and its members must be confident in whatever they are presenting to the world. They should be the eyes of the audience. A strong and strategic approach must compel the audience to look into the product from its marketing team’s eyes. A regular check and improvisation in the strategies is the key to a healthy and long-lasting marketing career in this competitive world.
KPIs
The performance of the team must be tapped in order to understand the potential and the growth. Some of the key performance indicators which are used to make unbiased decisions are as follows :
- Turnover
It is the most important and transparent KPI of all. Through this, it is very convenient to judge a marketing team as it presents a very comprehensive quantitative analysis of its performance. It indicates how many from the huge pile of target audience gets converted into a customer for the firm.
The major idea of marketing is to convert the maximum of the audience into loyal customers. Every firm desires to have not just customers but loyal customers who visit again and again without any further advertisement, marketing, or compulsion.
- Cost per lead
An efficient marketing team must aim at cost-cutting at every level. Ideally, once someone from the target audience has been converted into a customer, further very less or negligible marketing should be used in order to convert that customer into a recurring customer.
An instant connection is formed with the customer when a sale takes place. Now this relationship must be strengthened after every purchase.
Will Whitham
Sales point of view
Even after a lot of marketing, a very few from the list of potential customers make it to the list of actual customers. This clearly shows a vivid discrepancy that the first and the most crucial impact has been provided by the marketing strategies.
Thus, a marketing team is the soul of any big firm.
What it's like to work in a sales service
But not to forget that making a customer a recurring or a loyal customer lies majorly in the hands of a sales team with their exceptional customer services, listening to the grievances and addressing the same as soon as possible, forwarding the valuable feedback and thus making the entire services hassle free for them.
KPIs
Making contacts, engaging with the audience, and forming strong connections are some of the valuable traits of an efficient sales team. There exist the most important and significant attributes for judgment of a sales teams which are :
- Customer Interaction
More the number of requests for demo sessions, client engagement activities, call back requests, better the chances of converting the crowd into customers.
- Monthly Sales Growth
It is a tedious but necessary task to keep track of all the transactions which have been made at every step and thereby compiling them into a report to analyze profits and losses as well as increments and decrements. This report is a decision maker
The Bloomin’s example::
Above all, it is important to clearly redefine the roles of the two teams at Bloomin.
The Marketing team is there to bring leads. The Sales team is there to convert leads into customers. For this, the two teams have a significant point in common: they use the same data. We must therefore share this data.
To use and distribute the data correctly between the two teams, Gaël has set up sprint meetings at Bloomin. During these meetings, the two teams pool their ideas to try out new processes and new experiments:
At the beginning of the sprint: take insights from Sales who are confronted with the same prospects as Marketing, but who have more opportunities to exchange with them.
At the end of the sprint: to know how the appointments went and where the Marketing team can improve over time.
Not only do the teams attend the same meetings but they also use the same collaborative tools: Trello, Notion, LaGrowthApp etc.
What data is shared by both the Marketing teams and the Sales teams?
On the top-funnel part:
- The number of leads acquired
- The number of demos performed
- The number of downloads of White Papers
- The number of views on the different content
On the bottom-funnel part:
- The number of closed deals
- Feedback on lead quality (lead/persona fit)
Will Whitham
Conclusion
One important takeaway from this discussion is that there isn't any battle striking between sales and marketing. Both of the teams hold equal importance in their respective areas.
For the growth of a successful firm, the marketing team needs to be very efficient in order to pave a way for a potential customer and the sales team needs to complete the transaction. And that is how both of them have to coexist to realize the growth of their firm exponentially!
About the author
Gaël is VP Marketing at Bloomin. He has accumulated more than 15 years of experience in France, Spain and England.
He has worked both in start-ups and in digital transformation agencies, on Sales and Marketing issues. His expertise focuses on digital marketing, growth hacking and no code.
How are you taking steps to align marketing and sales? Share your experiences (or get some handy advice) on the CMO Alliance Community Slack channel.
