Sales marketing: see how to apply it to your company and beat the competition
Sales marketing is a topic that is gaining more and more strength and notoriety in the market. After all, when we talk about marketing and sales, who has never seen or had friction between these two areas?
In fact, in many companies, the gap between marketing and sales is huge. The work of one or the other is not always clear and each person works in their own department, without any form of association, partnership or the slightest notion of interdependence in the work of these two areas.
The obvious problem with this is that all information is lost and the end result of the business is compromised. Without good marketing positioning, a company cannot reach and attract markets outside its current influence. While, without a good commercial positioning, the opportunity to attract (or retain) customers will be significantly reduced.
That's why the partnership between sales and marketing can be one of the main drivers of results and growth for organizations.
Therefore, in this text, you will understand more about this term and how to implement it so as not to lose sales to your competitors. Let's go?
What is Vendarketing?
Before talking about how to prevent the competition from stealing your customers, I want to explain a little more about the concept.
Vendarketing is a combination of two words: sales and marketing. This strategy aims to maintain alignment between marketing and sales teams so that both can get the most out of their business. Thus increasing the revenue generation potential for the business.
Likewise, the method aims to promote alignment between sales and marketing professionals who work within a company and who, essentially, pursue the same objective.
In theory, this definition is simple and even explainable. However, in reality, there are many inadequacies arising from poor internal communication that can undermine a company's strategy in both areas.
Therefore, fostering integration between teams is something that broadens your perspective and can benefit your business in countless ways.
In short, the sales objectives are:
- Optimize an organization’s operations;
- Ensure the convergence of all information between the marketing and commercial teams;
- Increase profit;
- Attract more leads qualified.
Why invest in Vendarketing?
The basics are what we have learned so far. In other words, you may have already realized that Vendarketing's main objective is to keep marketing and sales processes aligned.
Now, let's see why this is so important.
What are the benefits of Vendarketing?
The benefits of Vendarketing are many. Therefore, I will mention some of them for you to understand better. Check out:
1 – Improve the experience of your potential customers
The first point that will be affected when implementing Vendarketing and its strategies in your company is the experience of your potential customers.
It is Vendarketing's responsibility to adjust the discourse of the two groups. So that, when moving the campaign from Marketing to Sales, your leads understand that they are dealing with the same company and do not experience a breach of expectations.
2 – Improved communication between teams
This way, you improve communication between these two groups that will work more closely. And, in this way, it also aligns the delivery of work.
This communication is essential to speed up the flow of leads through the sales funnel, resolve problems more quickly and, therefore, make both teams work more efficiently and with a clear objective: profitability.
3 – Don’t miss any more opportunities
Another very important point of Vendarketing is its impact on corporate objectives. You may be thinking “the more leads, the better”, but that’s not true.
The best objective that a marketing team can achieve is to generate the number of leads that the sales team needs, and that they can serve with quality.
In other words, generating too many leads can harm your results in the long term. Well, these leads cool down and will not be as ready to buy as they were when they were generated.
Therefore, Vendarketing helps to stabilize this balance, checking the performance of both teams to ensure that opportunities are not missed. Thus maximizing the potential of each one, increasing their performance.
4 – Set realistic goals
As you can see, Vendarketing, too, is about metrics, right?
In fact, this is one of the main and most important points that will impact your business with this strategy.
With it, you'll know exactly how many opportunities your marketing team can create and how they translate into sales.
The idea is that they do work that:
- Do not exceed the capacity of your sales team to provide service;
- Don't go below the minimum viable to achieve your goals.
This way, you can set realistic goals that make sense for both teams.
5 – Predictability
With all of this, you can gain greater predictability, which directly affects the financial health of your company.
Thanks to Vendarketing techniques, you will be able to calculate how much income your team will generate in the coming months. Furthermore, you can act preventively if this goal is not achieved, being able to draw up action plans to facilitate the development and growth of your business.
In other words, you will know precisely what to do and where to invest to increase your sales number.
How to implement Vendarketing in your company
As you have seen so far, the Vendarketing method is really very advantageous. But, the time has come to discover how to implement the techniques in your daily life and prevent the competition from getting in front of you and stealing potential customers from your company.
The first thing that will change the game for your Marketing and Sales teams will be the SLA (Service Level Agreement).
In fact, the SLA is the set of rules that defines actions and delivery at each point of contact between departments, which avoids subjective factors that lead one group to blame the other if the goal is not achieved.
Check out some examples of SLAs that can be made in Vendarketing:
1 - Marketing
- Name;
- E-mail;
- Definition of information that makes a lead valid;
- Telephone;
- Number of employees;
- Invoicing.
2 - Sales
- Contact with the lead within a maximum of 1 hour after it is passed through marketing;
- 4 attempts at least before giving up on a lead.
When these rules are clearly defined, the role of each service becomes clear and measurable.
From now on, no salesperson can complain that a prospect is bad, and the marketing sector will no longer argue that a salesperson doesn't know how to deal with a prospect.
As long as everyone adheres to the agreement, subjective perception is out of the process. Oh, and this will help bring peace and harmony to the workplace.
Finally, don't forget to review your SLAs from time to time to see if you can improve them and, consequently, achieve incredible results.
3 – Meetings
To ensure that this alignment is not lost over time and understand how things will work, it is essential to ensure that teams meet at least every 15 days.
In fact, it is very easy to revert to a previous state and lose all the interventions made in teams that work synergistically.
So, in these meetings, it is very important to know whether the metrics are aligned with the monthly goals, the quality of the opportunities created and what one team can do to help the other.
Is it necessary to hire a specific Sales Marketing professional?
You do not necessarily need to hire a specific professional to perform this function. If you have a small team, you can designate one of the people on your current marketing team to be your company's sales manager.
To do this, she can learn more about the topic by taking some courses, reading books and researching the content on blogs about marketing. The main thing here is that you understand the areas of sales and marketing well.
However, if you work with a large sales team, you will most likely only need one person to look after the health and alignment of both groups. And, therefore, it is important to have a person dedicated just to this.
This professional must have certain specific characteristics, but in general, he needs to understand the process of both teams, be familiar with the numbers and have enough autonomy to intervene, if necessary, in the process of both areas.
But, don't let that stop you from getting started as soon as possible. The sooner you implement Vendarketing in your business, the fewer opportunities you will miss and the more profits you will make in a short time.
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