Your sales results can be improved if they are supported by a solid marketing foundation. Gaining visibility for your products and services, improving the recognition of your brand and positioning yourself as a reference to solve your clients’ problems allows your salespeople to have an easier job not only of prospecting, but of any of the phases of your sales funnel buy facebook comments.
Include all the knowledge and experience of your sellers in the design of your inbound strategy so that the terms, keywords, expressions and questions are the same ones used by your future clients.
Involve your sellers in your online marketing strategy: from your buyer persona to the management of your email marketing campaigns. Give them data on how your social networks work, the conversations that take place on them and how the content on your blog is managed. Explain to them how you manage leads and how you qualify them before passing them on to sales, what you consider important to improve the status of a contact and how visitors interact with your website.
Likewise, your content creators, community managers and social media managers should know how your sellers prospect, what listings they use and what tools they use to record their efforts: What is their sales script and how do they manage objections? How do you manage refusals and what happens to those contacts that are not current sales but may be future sales? How do we stay on their radar?
Improve your buyer persona with the knowledge of your sellers
You have probably defined your buyer persona in the marketing department with a mix of information from interaction on your website, social networks and other online marketing channels. To this you have surely added the knowledge of those responsible to get closer to that semi-fictional definition of your ideal client, concluding in one or several buyer personas on which you work, guiding your content, conversations and strategy.
But have you crossed that information with your salespeople and commercial directors? Your sellers have made many calls, sent emails, held meetings, given demonstrations and closed sales to, with complete certainty, be able to refine the details of your buyer persona. Do they match your needs? Do your solutions fit him? How do customers express their doubts? What are their objections to your services or products?
If there is a lot of difference between the profile and the information that your sellers handle, it is necessary to rethink your inbound marketing strategy and your sales so that they work towards the same objective. Review your communications and style, your content and your audience to detect differences. If there are many, it is a good time to rethink your website and what audience it is aimed at.
If the differences are on the other side of sales, and your clients resemble your buyer persona but your sellers do not manage this information, they may be making a mistake with the construction of their commercial argument, their scripts and, in general, their marketing strategy. sales . Review, together, how to approach both positions to bring them closer to the reality that your clients show you.
Analyze the data and let the numbers speak
Surely at some point you have let yourself be carried away by intuition, it has happened to me too, but making a decision based on sensations can lead to disaster if there is no data to support it. Logically, it is also possible to get it right, but wouldn’t it be better to let the analysis of the actions being carried out be the guide to take one path or another?
Take all the KPIs of your marketing department and represent them in a way that they can be studied (maybe you really like a cold spreadsheet, like me, but it is not the best for setting up a meeting and working towards results ). Try to collect data from all the channels you are using, even when some of them are somewhat smaller or in an initial state: it is better to have a global idea than to lack data. Don’t forget to support all this information on the data layer offered by Google Analytics.
Take your CRM, extract the data from the sales funnel and analyze its performance by campaigns, by quarter and as a whole. What actions have been successful and why? What actions have failed and what was the reason? Let your CRM figures do the talking. If you use Hubspot, even in its free version, you will be able to extract the conversion for each phase of the funnel and the accumulated conversion, the average duration of business closure and the average duration in each phase as well as the overall business forecast. There is more information that can be displayed through different sales reports and dashboards so take your time to pull out the relevant information.
Now, with all the data, it is time to cross-check the information. If you have a Hubspot Pro or Enterprise version, you will have it easy since you will have managed marketing and sales from the same platform. If this is not the case and you do not have a comprehensive control panel, you have to do more artisanal, but necessary, work of reflection and introspection, looking for the strengths, weaknesses and mistakes made.
Make changes and measure
If you have already collected a lot of information, you have analyzed it and you have your sales and marketing departments working together, you are surely wondering: how do I sell more? To begin, start with the analysis you have done. The analysis of information is useless if we do not reach conclusions that allow us to make decisions:
- Which user segment interacts the least with our marketing channels?
- What are the most common objections? Do we know how to manage them correctly?
- What movements do visitors make to your website? Are they what you thought they would do?
- Are there frictions in any phase of your sales funnel? Are prospects spending too much time in one phase?
- Is the conversion rate of your website not what you expected?
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes
Without error there is no learning. We cannot expect to get it right the first time despite all the analyses, control panels and meetings we put in place. In the end, each decision we make will be based on a series of parameters, which will be those that we decided to study in the beginning. What if these parameters were not the ones that best represented the problem we wanted to address? What if we only got a partial view? What if our solution has been poorly executed?
Measuring the results of our corrective actions in a specific period of time is important to be able to determine if, basically, we have made a mistake in some parameter and to be able to react in time. Keep in mind that we must experiment to get results. Although these tests will be based on your experience and knowledge, nothing prevents us from making errors in any assessment or interpretation of any of the above data.
If you want to control your margin of error, calculate the hours it will take to launch and monitor it, as well as the cost of the associated tools. Review the objectives and quantify what the investment will be if the expected improvement does not occur. Add the opportunity cost and any other structural costs that allow you to have a better and more complete idea of the investment you will make to find new solutions.
You can include all these costs within an accounting chapter as items associated with research, innovation and development. This places an additional layer of control over them and will allow you to periodically assign a budget to this item. And now imagine that you can apply for public aid or seek financing associated with your investment plan to improve and transform your company.
Conclusions
Making both departments work as one, adapting and modifying campaigns, sharing information and resources is a winning way to improve your sales. Not only because you will advance in depth, capacity and analysis but because people will work with common objectives in mind: achieving objectives and improving results.