Leads are those people who, after going through the “convert” stage within the inbound marketing methodology , change their status from visitors to sales opportunities. In this conversion process, Internet users provide their data in exchange for a content offer (ebook, templates, whitepapers , infographics, webinars, etc.) automatically becoming leads.
This is why, as we have already mentioned, the central core of smart marketing is the generation of leads , since if we continue with the chain of this methodology, the next step will be to transform those sales opportunities into clients.
Marketing + ventas: smarketing
If we look deeper into the functions involved in this process, both the marketing team and the sales team play a major role in this stage.
The first because it develops techniques to capture these leads (content marketing, SEO, blogging) and the second, because it is responsible for stimulating a final purchase in these people (email marketing, CMR, personalized attention) ultimately converting them into potential clients for companies.
In this sense, the marketing team is responsible for transferring these sales opportunities and their contact information to the sales team, who is responsible for closing the purchase process by personally communicating with these users and addressing their needs individually.
smarketing
If we understand how the inbound marketing methodology works , both tasks (marketing and sales) are sufficiently explicit to condense into a larger strategy the importance of teamwork within these two areas to achieve common goals and improve company revenues.
Below, we invite you to learn about the benefits of aligning your marketing team with your sales team to ensure that your company runs smoothly at all times:
benefits-of-smarketing
1. Better understanding of your buyer personas
Buyer personas are defined as structured profiles with real and semi-fictional data that companies create to gain in-depth knowledge of the mindset of their potential buyers, with the aim of building appropriate content strategies for them.
These profiles allow you to know the motivations and needs of your clients (and of the people who may meet those same characteristics) in order to know exactly what to sell (products and/or services), how to sell it (messages to use) and through which platforms (social networks, blogs, etc.).
If your marketing team is perfectly aligned with your sales team, together they will be able to collect valuable information that will progressively feed the characteristics of these profiles.
For example, marketing gains insights from them by monitoring social media and observing comments on published content, while sales digs deeper into that information through conversations with customers via emails and phone calls.
Both teams can help you improve your understanding of your buyer personas, because if together you set the common goal of understanding the needs of the people who connect with your brand, the content and marketing strategies you generate will be increasingly accurate and therefore successful.
2. Growth in annual revenue
According to a study by Aberdeen Group , companies that have strong alignment between marketing and sales achieve 20% annual revenue growth.
If we compare this data with companies that are unaware of the importance of cellphone number philippines smart marketing , this variable decreases by 4%. When both departments are working at the same pace and have the same objectives in terms of the number of sales to be made in a given time, it is much easier to close and obtain transactions exponentially.
The sales team will know exactly who they are communicating with, how to sell to them, and what their needs are, thanks to the information that the marketing team has been collecting. Therefore, sales will simply be in charge of finishing off a job that has been slowly being built by the marketing team.
On the other hand, it is well known that people make a purchase when they trust both the product, content and/or service they are consuming, as well as the equipment that is being sold to them.
The close relationship that telemarketing within this team can generate with potential clients, as a result of that prior knowledge provided by another group of specialists, becomes the key to increasing the number of sales, ROI and of course, annual income.
3. A more pleasant work environment
Smarketing should also be understood as an effort to strategically align the objectives of the marketing department with those of sales, which have historically been characterized by being in conflict with each other, precisely because they have different objectives.
In this regard, Hubspot (a pioneering company in inbound marketing) reveals that 87% of the terms that marketing and sales use to describe each other are negative. For example:
perspectiva-smarketing
Inbound marketing and smarketing in particular seek to break this terrible habit and show companies an effective way to create a more pleasant work environment .
As we have already observed, marketing and sales must have the same language and share information with each other. This constant communication and exchange of knowledge will avoid the antagonism that has characterized both departments for decades, promoting inclusion and education between them.
The marketing team will always have something valuable to learn from the sales team and vice versa. The central idea is to view them as two halves of the same team and not as completely opposite areas, because at the end of the day, together they represent the backbone of company growth.
So being in constant contact (regardless of derogatory adjectives) should be a long-term practice.
Having your sales and marketing teams aligned will be key to growing your company's revenue and at the same time, it will help you internally to develop stronger relationships between members of your organization.