Nowadays technology has been playing a massive role in the progress of development of many organizations, especially in advertising service from several large information technology companies like Google, Facebook, etc. Yet, this comes along with the disadvantage that our customers are getting smarter and more choosey due to the fact that in just one area of the marketplace, our ‘Gods’ have a bunch of choice to decide whether the goods should be bought. As a result, achieving your desired goals regarding to revenue and profit is getting harder and harder.

Part 1: Marketing and Sales - Greatest Friendship of All.

According to Mark Nadolny (SeriousDecisions), “marketing typically supports sales by influencing more than 75 percent of all leads and sourcing up to 10 percent of them”, and Forbes added there was up to 60% of customers used their mobile devices while making a purchase decision. The role of salesman certainly cannot be denied; however, it is marketing which is a strong base for sales as well as other department work effectively.

Right from the start, the efficiency of your business is one of the biggest factors that encourages every activity of your organization. And ‘riding the gravy train’ is motivation making the owner put the sales target up on salesman, still, how could Sales Department search for a list of potential customers (also known as leads) quick enough to accomplish the mission of achieving your sales target. And now we have a reason to talk about the actual contribution of Marketing to carry out the goal of revenue. The key roles of Marketing team are the fundamental components supporting salesman to raising one company’s revenue or to reach his/her principal goals as well as organization’s.

1. Researching Target Audience:

One crucial question that every salesman needs to bring up every time a business strategy begins: ‘Who is your perfect customer?’ or in other words, defines the target audience of your product or service. And it is the contribution of marketers which help distinguish the target audiences of your brand, products or service.

In fact, one product could attract a wide range of customers, each has his/her own needs and targets. Consequently, the strategy built to adapt all types of customers might not success because it is not concentrate enough to deal with each of the customer segmentation.

By conducting the survey of defining who your customers and what their demands are, marketers have saved the time, resources and efforts needed when sales team drew up the business strategy.

So why not salesman but marketer is the one who directly carries out the research? Who else but marketers know and understand the essential needs and hobbies, thoughts and behaviors as well as the insight of customer and they are also excellent at analyze these data.

2. Branding:

Generally speaking, branding is critical to every organization compared to it 100 years ago. Among thousands of million company, corporation, etc. that are existing all over the world along with uncountable products and services, if you do not want yours to be saturated in the marketplace, then just knock the door of marketing team, they might help you be the next Apple or Coca-cola.

One more crucial thing is that products or services cannot be recognized by the customers if there are no branding activities at all.

Maintaining and spreading out your brand also create a cause that helps salesman be able to convince the customers easier. On the other hand, branding is a major factor making your customers stick to the products.

Another benefit of branding is that it’s a way to build your company’s culture and the belief of your employees, and in regarding to this, we will mention it in the second part of this article ‘Marketing and its benefits to company’s internal’.

3. Content Marketing:

Believed to be the most important element of Marketing, content marketing has been a ‘beloved’ strategic marketing approach recently. It’s not only important to marketers and their marketing plan, content marketing is also a tool that assist salesman to reach and filter the most potential customers thanks to content of the copies.

According to a survey of LinkedIn (2016), the efficiency of direct marketing is impairing rapidly:

• The ratio of clicking in a direct ad in all platform and format reduces to 0.06%.
• More than a half of the click happened unintentionally.
• The number of ad blocking app grew by 41% compared with the year of 2015 and costed $22 Billion of many publishers.

Instead of traditional advertising, content marketing, therefore, is an essential part of sales activities of every organization.

4. Promotion:

Promotion, especially offers, coupons, discounts, deals, etc. are the most basic methods of marketing that many companies still adapt up until now. Though many articles and researches have proved that these activities do more harm than good that you might face with when running a marketing campaign. Nevertheless, if a crew of marketers draw up a clear, suitable and serious strategy of marketing, offers, coupons or discounts could make your plan easily reach your customers by giving them the real experience. All of this are the keys to remove the stress on salesman regarding to maximizing the purchase amount, revenue and profit.

Marketing along with the four features above has enormously contributed to help and support sales team of organizations in increasing the revenue and the profit as well. However, one of the biggest problems that comes to every organization (from startup to big corporation) is overlapping others’ works between two or more departments, especially between Sales and Marketing. Therefore, a framework that could help each of your organization captures the tasks and communicates better with one another like OKR is necessary. This method is an ‘old-but-new’ approach used by many companies/global corporations such as: Google, Intel, Uber, etc. owing to their transparent, flexible, easy-to-use feature of this methodology.

Many managers/leaders always neatly divide the workload of these two departments so that they could easily manage them, nevertheless, a huge number of research show that Marketing and Sales have a close two-way relationship. It’s not just marketing department contributes a lot to the success of sales team through the four-main feature mentioned above, at the same time, sales team also assists marketing in providing data, statistic which are gained in the sales process. That is the reason why marketing team could plan such massive and successful marketing/PR strategy. As a result, engaging, directing this couple cannot be missed or work summarily. Below are 3 small tips that could help you and your organization associate marketing and sales team together successfully, then your company could save time and grow business:

• Sharing and transferring information, data, statistic that are relevant to both department.
• Being transparent in the working process is the most important factor, this will either keep the engagement and enhance the prestige between the two.
• Using framework that could easily align marketing and sales team’s objectives and key results to the same line. One of the most effective method that has been used by many big and small organization such as Google, Intel, Uber, etc. is OKR (Objectives and Key Results), thanks to the transparent, clear and easy-to-use features of this method.

If your organization, especially marketing and sales department have gone down the wrong way. Hopefully, this article of Goalify will help you recognize the importance of engagement of marketing and sales team, how and why they should work together then make as much revenue as possible.