Great marketing professionals work closely with sales professionals to gain a transactional-level understanding of their Market. They understand Sales professionals directly engage with those who’ve been attracted by advertising and negotiate and exchange in the details of the Market’s needs, ultimately driving the customers to a rationalized decision.
The lessons learned in these exchanges are anecdotes and will, in aggregate, refine your message to clearly represent your identity to qualified leads as you create and strengthen your consumer relationships. Implementation of this feedback will improve your websites, your campaigns, your investments in assets and your review of your existing advertising portfolio.
Collecting Data
It’s critical to work with sales professionals to learn the characteristics and expectations of the Market. Consumer relationships are regularly being redefined by industry leaders who have cultivated an expectation of instantaneous access to all information relevant to a purchase.
Sales professionals interact with the Market on their terms and in their language; collecting, providing and often negotiating over these exchanges in information as a method to build a case for a purchase. In our Sales Team, we develop a methodology for each product-line or service we manage for our clients.
We are, of course, always focused on fleshing out the specific needs of our customer in order to position our offer as advantageously as possible. However, we also weave market-related inquiries into our methodologies to capture quantifiable numbers to support or refute our hypotheses regarding the Market, especially in the cases where the product is still new to that Market.
Re-Shaping
You need to work with Sales to focus your message to the Market. Every sales professional on our team begins a relationship by interviewing and educating a lead from the first communication.
We want qualified leads to immediately know they are welcome and their search has come to an end.
Often this communication involves re-shaping the initial perceptions of the lead as we work through Qualification.
This re-shaping no matter how small or large, represents a dissonance between the expectations set by marketing and the reality of sales.
Murcadom & Sales
It may seem curious that a sales organization like Murcadom we maintain a full Marketing team complete with designers and web developers. However having in-house design lets us participate in the conversation with the Market at the mass level in real-time.
Due to our close relationship with our Marketing Team, we can weave market-related inquiries into our methodologies to capture quantifiable numbers to support or refute our hypotheses, especially in the cases where our product is still new to the Market. The Marketing Team uses sales relationship data in a statistical sense, to communicate to a wide audience with matching characteristics, while discouraging unqualified inquiries.
Ultimately, the insight gained in client-customer interaction should be used as way points to continually direct marketing professionals to increasingly accurate conclusions about how and where to communicate with the Market. Sales professionals are the stewards of these interactions and can and should be directed to investigate their opportunities from the perspective of Market evaluation alongside negotiating to win the business.
Final Thoughts
Methodologies should be designed, evaluated and redesigned to sense and adapt to greater Market understanding as feedback continues to pour in from day to day work. This operational synergy generated by a close marketing-sales relationship will iteratively optimize your organization’s relationship to the Market.