Confusion with Sales and Marketing
As recently acknowledged in Raconteur’s Future CMO report, sales and marketing have had a turmoil relationship for many years. Marketing people can feel like they do most of the work, and then the sales team closes the deal and walks away with all the credit. Coincidentally, sales believe that marketing don’t do as much work as they claim.
At CommuniGator, we feel it’s important to look at how the role of the marketer is evolving; how the role differs from that of sales and highlight how digital technology is impacting the complicated relationship.
Today, marketers have far more tools and capabilities to engage with a buyer during the research process and this has impacted on the marketing and sales funnel, which has changed significantly, with the focus now more on the marketing team rather than sales – as illustrated below:
With marketers now better equipped to efficiently engage and serve customers during the upper and middle parts of the funnel, salespeople have been given the opportunity to spend most, if not all of their selling time with customers who are deep within in the funnel and likely to make a purchase. As a result, there is a growing need for businesses to reformulate their marketing and sales strategies, which has a very positive upside.
Converting digital body language into sales
With digital, marketers can spot where contacts are in the funnel based on their behaviour and the content that they consume.
Firstly, it’s vital that a business has engaging content at the awareness, interest and consideration stages.
It’s assumed that everyone generally starts at the awareness stage so relevant awareness content is often emailed first. Once it is believed that a contact is engaged through a piece of awareness content, interest content is naturally sent. Once engaged with three pieces of interest based content, the marketing team can move the contact down to the consideration stage and start sending suitable consideration content. Once they drop down from the intent to the evaluation stage, their considered hot and sales can take over!
The Future
Well, it’s safe to say that unless marketers recognise the changes that are articulated in the funnel and within the buying process, there will be no future for the CMO. The new role of the CMO is to be able to stitch together a diverse and complex portfolio of responsibilities, becoming more of a general manager with proficient customer experience.
To help marketers, marketing automation is now the only way to successfully manoeuvre people quickly inside the new funnel by helping them to hone in on what makes their contacts tick and what persuades them to take that next step towards making a purchasing decision. It’s of course about getting the right content to the right contact, at the right time. Once successfully executed, the sales team can start to work their magic!
Learn more about CommuniGator’s marketing automation software.