Sales and Marketing Must Be Part of Same Meetings!
When you look around the room at your sales meeting, who is present? Is it the sales manager and the salespeople? Maybe an owner shows up at times, too?
If you are like most businesses, marketing is missing from the sales meetings.
Why? Why is it that when sales and marketing are so intertwined, most sales meetings do not include marketing people?
It’s almost like heart and lungs; if you don’t have the heart to pump the blood, what good does the oxygen do? Think of it as a process. Marketing is supposed to get people to raise their hands and attract attention. From there, the salespeople carry forward in answering questions and lead the people to a sale. Without one, you don’t have the other.
Sales and marketing meetings should be a regular, scheduled part of business, because the success of both depends on each other, and the feedback they can give and get can make all the difference in your business surviving or thriving.
Can you imagine the benefit of your marketing people hearing directly from the salespeople as to the kinds of responses they are getting from the customers who have been attracted by the advertising campaigns? Marketing does not get the feel of the client, whereas salespeople do because they are the ones in direct contact with the “result of marketing”.
Can you imagine how much more effective your marketing could be if they were able to hear the salespeople say that a particular ad did not work well for this neighborhood, but it sure worked well for that other one? Or that the people we’re hearing from for this campaign are tire-kickers looking for low price? Or could you bump up the advertising on that station, because the majority of those leads have brought in our kind of people?
And how about the benefit of salespeople hearing from the marketing people? Do you think it would be beneficial for your salespeople to hear where the marketing money is being spent, and how critical it is for them to sell a predetermined amount of sales to some types of advertising in order to make it profitable enough for the company to continue marketing with that venue?
Do you think it would benefit your salespeople if they declare up and down that a certain marketing is not working, but your marketing people could show that yes, actually, it is working. Some people are selling this quite well. Could that either motivate the salesperson to figure out what the others are doing and train on it, or otherwise help the company to assign leads to the ones who are selling certain advertising types?
It’s a definite “Yes” to all the above! Here was mentioned only a few of the hundreds of ideas as to how sales and marketing could talk and work together to make the whole sales process flow better and result in better clients and more profitable sales.
Your sales and marketing people belong in the same room at the same time, communicating and exchanging data, thoughts and ideas.