20 Ways Marketing Can Support Sales

At ColinKurtis, we know that your sales team and your potential customers are top priority—and that sales enablement means empowering your sales team. To make sure that marketing supports sales, all you have to do is ask all the right questions and give all the right answers. Here’s a list to get you started on the right path.

Join Forces and Build, Together

1. Start things out right—engage sales & marketing together to get everyone on the same page, setting the stage for truly cross-functional teams. Kick things off with a meeting or a survey, and maybe even attend some sales calls together.
2. Find out the basics about your core marketing technology components—what kind of lead database & customer relationship management (CRM) systems are used? How is lead information kept up-to-date?
3. Determine the buyer’s journey, from initial point of contact throughout the entire sales process, and identify the ideal target customer, so you can attract better quality prospects.
4. Define clear responsibilities, processes and goals to sync your marketing & sales efforts, including processes to generate, qualify & follow up on leads, increase your sales process efficiency and improve close rates.
5. Rely on marketing to create targeted content to address questions & roadblocks at different touchpoints of the sales cycle.
6. Build awareness of your brand, to help prospects quickly understand who you are, what you are offering and the benefits of using your products or services.

Maintain the Perfect Balance

7. Keep the lines of communication open, so that marketing & sales remain in sync, and can adjust tactics as necessary.
8. Avoid creating content for content’s sake; understand exactly what your sales team needs from you to guide prospects from initial touchpoint to close and ensure the team is made aware of campaigns & promos, so they can align their communications with prospects.
9. Support sales goals by enabling salespeople with the exact collateral and templates they need to succeed, from a first call deck & product sheets to better email templates & presentation tools. Generating dynamic content like blogs, social media posts, and customer surveys can also be very effective at garnering prospects.

Make Every Move Count

10. Create great content by educating prospects with a constant flow of new information, campaigns, and programs that deliver consistent messaging—and qualified prospects through targeted direct approaches.
11. Decrease sales cycle times by offering reasons to purchase throughout the cycle. Create sticky content like testimonials and case studies, those unbiased endorsements of your brand that help influence a sale.
12. Cultivate your email programs with targeted lists and identify and follow-up on opened emails.
13. Develop your web presence—create flexible, measurable online ad campaigns and sticky web content that keeps site users engaged & coming back for more. Optimize your website to be a great sales accelerator that tracks the addresses of prospects who visit, and measure web analytics & track web conversions to customers. Create a sales portal on your site filled with market & trend data for sales to share with potential customers.
14. Track your progress—develop a process for shared data & reporting to provide lead intelligence gathered during the qualification stage. Capture and track using marketing software and/or CRM systems, and integrate your CRM with marketing lead generation.
15. Check out the competition—to establish your competitive differentiation through strategic marketing plans and campaigns for sales people to educate prospects about why they’ll love doing business with you.
16. Put stock in trade shows—target which to attend based on audience, qualify & measure lead generation obtained there, and increase market knowledge & trust through PR campaigns, sponsorships & editor meetings.
17. Get the picture with form completions, content downloads, event attendance, viewed web pages, and more to develop lead behaviors that give sales a clearer picture of each prospect, giving them the ability to tailor conversations, prioritize follow up, and spend time on the most qualified leads.

Follow Up and Feed Back

18. Nurture leads and share valuable consumer data—to give sales even more fuel, with customer reaction to specific products, etc.
19. Establish a process for sales to give marketing feedback like conversions, customer lifetime value, and revenue generated to help marketing refine its strategies to deliver the most qualified leads.
20. Just ask ColinKurtis—there are at least 20 more things we can do to help you succeed.