How Marketing Can Help Your Sales Team Perform Better

Marketing is the key to making your sales team sell more, faster.

There are plenty of articles out there covering the soft benefits of integrating sales and marketing. But there are few examples of real tasks your marketing team can complete that decrease the buying cycle and increase your sales teams productivity. Here are a few important ways marketing can enable sales to perform at a higher level.

Collateral creation

Creating and organizing collateral will make life easier on your sales team. Every sales person needs collateral. The larger the value of your sale and the more competitors you have, the more collateral you should be prepared to create or have available.

Examples of collateral for your sales team:

• Case studies
• Whitepapers
• Testimonials
• Proposals
• Contracts
• Presentations (Powerpoints, Google Slides)
• Business cards
• Elevator pitch
• Target personas
• Product catalogs
• Trade show booth signage

Most smaller companies will let their sales people create sales content themselves. This is a big mistake. All sales collateral works together to reinforce a strong brand. This means all collateral needs to be branded with the right logos, taglines and colors. It needs to have the right voice and value points. These are things marketing people think about that sales often ignores. Enable your sales team to sell faster by clearly organizing collateral and keeping it on a shared website or drive. It’s important to have an update process so people don’t send outdated PDFs, presentations and videos to clients. A little work up front will make things easier on your sales department for many months or years down the road.

Remarketing

Here’s how a sales focused remarketing campaign works:

• Get your Google Ads specialists to setup Google Ads or Adroll remarketing tracking on your website.
• Host proposals or quotes at unique URL addresses on your website. For example (this isn’t a real link but notice the structure): www.gaintap.com/proposals/acmecorporation/proposal01
• Create ads that target visitors of the URL subfolder (/proposals/).
• Visitors of the URL will be shown your advertising when they are on other websites, reminding them that they have a decision to make regarding your proposal.

For most remarketing programs, you will need to wait until a threshold of visits (eg, 100 unique visits) has been reached at the target URL before ads will show. It’s best to setup your remarketing tracking sooner than later for this reason.

Outbound lead generation

Marketing can create more leads that empower sales people to go out and sell. An outbound sales person needs a constant supply of leads to call or email. A good digital marketer understands how to generate email lists for outreach. There are many ways to do this from scraping sites to using lead generation software like Leadfuze. Aside from gathering the leads, your marketing team can organize, categorize and rate leads to prioritize sales people’s time.

Outbound email followup automation

Marketing can automate mundane tasks to enable sales teams to be more productive. Some small sales teams will self-manage their email followups using Google Calendars or even Post-it notes. Let your marketing team help sales automate email followup using tools like Rebump. This simple piece of software lets your sales people follow-up through pre-made templates called “bumps.” It’s easy to set this up and they can be personalized with the recipient’s information like first name, last name and company name. The bumps can be delayed by days, weeks or even months from the first send. When the recipient responds to the email, the bump is cancelled. Email automation tools plug into your existing email platforms like Gmail and Outlook. They let you automatically followup with prospects without the hassle of manually mailing days, weeks and months later.[/caption] Automating followup takes a lot off your sales team’s plate. They no longer have to face constant rejection. They can focus on things that cannot be automated well like phone calls and presentations with clients. It’s a great way to increase your team’s productivity.

Email newsletters

Marketing can help sales people educate their prospects and clients. Sales people need reasons to re-engage prospects and past customers. A great way to do this is with a personal newsletter sent from the sales person. This can either be a personal HTML template for each sales person, or simply a shared newsletter that marketing creates.

Email tracking

Your marketing team can help setup tracking for your sales team’s emails. Email tracking can sync with your web analytics program for goal measuring. It can also let your team know who is responsive or unresponsive to specific messages. For example, if a prospect never opens an email with a quote in it, they may need a phone call instead. Without tracking in place, a sales person may think this prospect is just thinking the quote over. This wastes precious time and delays closing the sale. Marketing can assist your sales team by adding tracking to their email templates. This lets your sales team know where to invest their time while outbounding prospects.[/caption]

Examples of email tracking solutions for sales teams include:

• Personalized click-through URLs added to emails and email signatures
• Google Analytics tracking to measure click through and open rates within Google Analytics
• Recommendations and setup of sales focused email tracking software like Yesware

Email templates

Marketing can increase your sales people’s productivity with pre-made email templates. If your team uses Google Business email they can easily load templates on the fly using integrations like “Canned Responses.” Outlook calls this functionality “Quick Parts” which can be setup using this guide.

Example email templates marketing can create for sales

• First touch cold email template
• Follow up email templates
• Proposal email templates
• Review email templates
• Past customer re-engagement templates
• Email signature and out of office templates
• Transactional email templates
• Welcome email templates

Website profiles

Marketing can increase your authority by creating profiles on your website for each sales person. Every sales person should be listed on your website ideally with a photo and short biography.

Sales team profiles on your company website help:

• Legitimize your sales people and associates them with your company.
• Your sales people to connect with prospects on a human level.
• Your website show up in search results if a prospect searches for a sales person.

Chances are your marketing team also manages your website. They should be involved so your photos and descriptions are on brand and effective at connecting with prospects.

LinkedIn profile optimization

Marketing can help sales teams by optimizing their LinkedIn profiles. This is more than just fixing typos and grammar. LinkedIn profiles can be optimized for search in a similar way as website pages. Let your marketing team’s search engine optimization specialist help your sales people get found on LinkedIn.

Reputation management

Marketing can monitor and influence your sales teams public image. Some things are best left out of the workplace such as politics and religion. You may have sales people who are publicly sharing wild weekends and strong political or religious beliefs on Facebook and LinkedIn. Or you may have employees who have past criminal charges or scandals attached to their names that show up in search results. Your marketing team can go through and audit these situations. Some can be easily resolved such as setting public posts to private. Others may require more creativity to solve such as burying search results. But you shouldn’t risk closing large deals because of poor decisions made in the past or present.