Marketing and sales are often viewed as stand-alone, departments. Despite this, both sales and marketing serve the same purpose: to attract and convert leads. After working in sales for several years, Cyrus Baseghi learned exactly where these two worlds intersect and how each influences the other. The following are three important lessons from the world of sales that are sure to improve your marketing efforts:
1. Find the Person in your Buyer Personas
One of the first lessons any successful salesperson learns is how to relate to others. Marketers would do well to take a leaf out of the salesperson’s handbook to learn how to find the person within their buyer personas. Too often, marketing teams get bogged down in the metrics and statistics that they use to determine the effectiveness of their promotional efforts. Regardless of how well-put-together a marketing campaign may be, without a focus on the actual people that you’re marketing to, you’ll miss the mark.
Marketers would do well to put their focus back on the end-user rather than their metrics. Amidst all the analytics from various marketing campaigns lie real customers with unique emotions and challenges that are waiting to have their needs met. With this approach to content creation, marketing teams will be able to adjust their marketing tactics accordingly.
2. Empathize to Increase Engagement
As salespeople spend the majority of their time trying to close a deal, they experience a significant amount of rejection on a regular basis. While marketers spend their time toiling away to create the most eye-catching promotional content that they expect others to engage with, it is the salespeople are at the front lines facing the customers.
Cyrus Baseghi shares that salespeople must immediately empathize with their customers before pushing any marketing material if they hope to make any sort of lasting connection. Instead of expecting customers to jump at the chance they see new content, marketers must pull others in by empathizing with their needs. This lesson in empathy teaches marketers to tailor their content to address the specific challenges of customers while promoting their brands’ products or services.
3. Develop Content with Sales in Mind
Just as marketing teams should be sure to apply the lessons learned in sales, they should also create content with their sales teams in mind. Effective marketing content is the motivator that the sales team uses to push each customer through the sales funnel. To bridge the gap between sales and marketing, it’s essential that marketing teams have a clear idea of how their marketing content is used when promoting to prospects and customers. Thus, letting the sales process influence their content creation development is one of the most effective ways marketers can apply the lessons from their sales team.
Sales and marketing have more in common than most companies and their team members realize. Marketers that apply these lessons in their content creation and promotional efforts are sure to see incredible results across the board.
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