Sales, the Forgotten Marketing Channel

Sales and marketing are each struggling with their identities. In a world where buyers are more educated than ever, sales representatives are often deemed as not credible or avaricious. They tend to work impulsively and therefore don’t use the insights or documents provided by the marketing teams. Marketing, on the other hand, is often criticized for its lack of connection to the market and its high expenses. The discrepancy between the teams is causing friction, misunderstandings and conflicting ideals.

However, these issues can be solved easily by a solid alignment of marketing and sales. Sales representatives could increase their credibility by offering the right marketed content to the right customer at the right time, setting them apart from competitor’s sales teams. Marketing executives could get a better understanding of the market they are targeting by closely working together with sales. The teams would be generating more leads, closing more deals, and thus bringing in more revenue. According to Hubspot (2017), the alignment of marketing and sales could increase revenue by up to 208%!

There are multiple ways to get your teams to collaborate. We have picked out the most important ones that will guarantee the ‘smarketing’ strategy will be a success.

1. Communication is key

You need to communicate more clearly. Start by ensuring everybody uses the same definitions for terms like qualified lead and nurturing. Create a stimulating environment in which people are comfortable expressing their opinions. Open communication between the two teams is vital to make the alignment work.

2. Consistent branding and messaging

Get your name out there! Build awareness and trust by exposing your audience to your visual branding and messaging. Put your branding on technical sheets, quotations, and invoices. By aligning your marketing and sales, you ensure the consistency in this process.

3. Same platform

There is no better way to make a collaboration between teams successful than to have them working on the same platform. This forces team members to communicate openly and clearly, and leaves little to no room for misunderstandings or conflicts.

HiveCPQ is one of those platforms that pushes the alignment of marketing and sales. Our CPQ solution will ensure the work of your marketing teams actually gets used by sales. Your marketing teams can upload any templates or branded documents, while your sales teams will get notified when the time is right to send a technical sheet or an extended product explanation to the customer. This ensures the external communication is completely coordinated, which is further embodied in the quotations that are being sent out. A quotation is now more than just a description of the product and its price: it also includes Unique Selling Propositions, technical information and a visualization. The Hive implementation team will sit together with the marketing department to create templates for good-looking quotations. These can be generated by sales teams and/or customers in one click. The documents will impress your customers and nudge them toward buying, and will increase your brand awareness. HiveCPQ is therefore a powerful platform for smarketing.

The misalignment between marketing and sales might be the reason why you are not growing fast enough. You need to align the teams, as they will start generating more leads, closing more deals and bringing in more revenue. Have them communicate openly and use their branding consistently. Use a platform that will push the collaboration, like HiveCPQ does. It’s time to use sales as a marketing channel.