For the small business, sales and marketing must be aligned.

A sales class will teach you it’s all about the cold call or cold email. Right. Sure. But what’s in that cold email? Is there a link to a. Video you did? Is there. A white paper? Is there a calendar link where they can easily book a meeting with you? What about sending out a direct mail piece to an address? I took a six months sales class once, and they never talked about any of this stuff. Not trying to be call anyone out, but they never once spoke about marketing and sales aligning as one cohesive unit. Looking back on that, I would have really appreciated that.

Marketing and sales together

What I mean by this is, you need to be marketing items to drive sales and you need sales items to get people interested. You create a facebook ad, and someone clicks on it and you get an email address. Then you need to sell the client. They work in tandem with each other.

For the business owner with sales and marketing teams, these teams need to be together. Too often, they do not talk to each other.

Build out regular monthly meetings where marketing can update sales on what’s been created and what’s coming down the pipeline.

Build out regular monthly meetings where sales can speak to marketing about what they need.

Introduce your new marketing hires to the sales team, so they can build that rapport.

Provide your sales team with email correspondence that they can deploy

Talk to your sales team about what’s happening in their world and what they need now to be successful.

Then create those pieces for them

Managing the sales team

Keep your sales team in the know of anything you have added to the website or social media channels and encourage them to post about it/share on their own social media channels

For some salespeople, their biggest issue is follow up. Responding to all the leads that come in. Here’s where marketing can help as well. Marketing can build out cadence that makes it easy for the sales team follow up. Marketing can create items in the CRM that remind sales to follow up. Marketing can create material that sends out reminders to the contact. But again, if marketing doesn’t knows this is an issue, then marketing can’t do anything about it.