Most companies have been plagued by a problem with gross sales and advertising and marketing for a long time. Lead technology, market share, and customer retention are not the topics I’m addressing here, but they are all impacted by it, as are many other things. Specifically, I’m discussing the gap between sales and marketing.

For those that may relate, here’s a look at a normal day in the life of a Sales and Marketing professional.

What a Marketer Does in a Day

A marketer puts in long hours to create new customers for her sales team. She creates landing pages, email campaigns, and conversion optimization options for her website. She also provides valuable gated content. Her job continually generates leads, which she immediately transfers to the gross sales team. No matter what, more leads are better, right?

Every day, our marketer devotes his or her time and effort to creating high-quality advertising and marketing content and sales help materials. She informs the gross sales team of each new piece of content as soon as it’s ready. She even uploads the newest goods to the company’s Dropbox account to ensure that everyone has access to them.

It’s a sweet victory!

Of course, not for too long.

When she finds out that her salespeople haven’t even had as much as it seemed on the leads she’s been providing, her blood boils. It drives her to tears when she discovers that many sales team members have no idea about the content she has worked so hard to produce. What steps must be taken to make this a reality?

Marketing has a sense of being disregarded and devalued.

A Sales Representative’s Day at Work

Sales reps on the other side of the Grand Canyon of Sales and Marketing spend their days responding to urgent prospect inquiries, touring from meeting to meeting, conversing with prospects, and reacting to unexpected alterations with customers.

For some reason, Marketing has been unable to create the stuff she needs. For the sake of her consumers, she’s always on the search for fresh material. She is frustrated since the materials she has access to aren’t the ones she wants to work with. They’re either out-of-date or don’t seem to exist at all. As a result, she can now produce content on the fly. She just doesn’t have the time for this at this point in her life.

To add to her already stressful day, she is bombarded with messages from Marketing about fresh prospects she must follow up on. Without time to keep up with her customers and Marketing’s new leads, she would be unable to keep track of them. Furthermore, Marketing leads don’t seem to be verified in any way, so pursuing them relentlessly seems like a waste of time.

In Marketing, Sales feels misunderstood and underappreciated.

Always looking for fresh material to fulfil the urgent needs of her clients, she is always searching for new ideas

Marketers aren’t the only ones that feel disrespected and neglected. Sadly, this is a common occurrence. The American Marketing Association estimates that 90% of marketing content isn’t advertising. In reality, as many as 80% of the leads generated by marketing will never be taken up by sales.

No one is exempt from feeling frustrated. The CMO council found that salespeople spend up to 40% of their time developing their message and tools rather than marketing. According to HubSpot, just 27% of prospects sent to gross sales by advertising and marketing are first certified.

Isn’t it a bleak set of numbers? So, what is the reason behind this? It’s the gulf between Sales and Marketing that I spoke to previously. The firms they work for are suffering due to a massive divide between these two groups.

Sales and Marketing must be brought together as soon as possible to close the gap. Even while you probably agree, you may not fully understand why or what you can do about it.

Why Marketing and Sales MUST work together

Customers can see it, and that’s the first reason.

According to the IDC, fifty-seven percent of customers believe that salespeople are ill-prepared or not ready at all for preliminary conferences.

They may have been unable to properly prepare for these early meetings because of resources. These meetings with prospective customers are, after all, critical milestones in the sales process for sales representatives! To maximize their earnings, most sales representatives will need to be prepared for these situations. They just lacked the substance necessary to complete the project to their satisfaction.

Content is essential for sales agents to effectively interact with customers and close transactions. However, not just any content will do. They are looking for content that addresses their customers’ needs, issues, and preferences. And they want to be able to get the most recent version of it whenever they need it.

I’m stumped.

Begin the process of aligning sales and marketing by talking to your gross salespeople right now. Make an effort to comprehend the difficulties that salespeople experience during the sales process. Ask them if there are any holes in your marketing content that they notice. Understand how people should access stuff and where it’s most important to them. Investigate what advertising and marketing support has worked and what hasn’t, as well as the reasons behind each. Listen to what your sales staff have to say and write down how you might want better service them.

Asking sales staff to jot down questions they often hear from customers is one strategy I like to use. This list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) might serve as a list of content material you can produce to aid gross sales professionals when they meet similar questions again.

Businesses may begin aligning their sales and marketing efforts by starting a simple conversation with their sales personnel. If you want to know what people want, just ask them and then figure out how to send it.

Reason Number Two: An Excessive Amount of Lead

Inefficiencies abound when Sales and Marketing don’t work together as a team. A substantial number of leads will never be contacted by Sales, as shown by the examples provided earlier in this article. Entrepreneurs can generate many leads thanks to the growing use of promoting automation tools and their ability to help entrepreneurs achieve more than ever before. Nice work, sir. They don’t do a good job when they just sell all of them at once.

Why is this a problem? Having too many leads to follow up on causes sales staff to get overworked, which results in the leads being ignored. A good example of this is:

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend you’ve been working toward a lead generation goal of 30 leads per rep every week. That’s a great idea! You may think that way until you learn that each sales professional spends roughly two hours a week following up with leads and that each lead needs about 20 minutes of follow-up time. You now know that each sales representative may follow up to six leads each week. Your efforts have paid off, and you’ve managed to get 30 out the door.

Doesn’t this show you the problem? When it comes to this scenario, you’ll be giving them 24 more leads than they can physically handle: every week.

Although your advertising and marketing efforts seemed impressive, sales were being overloaded. Therefore, there were many unrealized opportunities.

I’m stumped.

An important first step in resolving this issue is to engage with your sales representatives and sales management as soon as possible to determine the realistic number of leads each person can follow up on each week. Then you may adjust the number of leads you send out.

Not that you’re trying to create fewer leads on purpose, in no way, shape, or form. The alternative is that nurturing and better qualifying them before passing them on to Sales may be necessary.

It seems like advertising and marketing are getting a lot more work. Perhaps. However, wouldn’t it be worth it if your labor was put to use? You may increase the chances of a lead becoming a prospect by nurturing it before passing it over to sales.

Sales opportunities for nurturing leads are 20% more than for unnurtured prospects, on average, according to the Demand Gen Report. In addition, companies who succeed in lead nurturing create 50% more leads that are truly ready to be sold—a third of the price of companies who aren’t very good at lead nurturing.

Invest some time in learning more about sales and the capacity of your sales reps to follow up with leads. Once you’ve improved the grade of your lead nurturing process, it’s time to reconsider how many leads you’re sending to sales.

Three-fold reason: money squandered

When sales staff spend time searching for or developing content, not only does this duplicate the efforts of promotion, but it also diverts their attention away from important sales opportunities. In addition, these squandered alternatives contribute as much as wasted money – a significant amount of money.

Think about it: A study by IDC found that by saving a single gross sales person only 60 minutes of prep time every week, a company may realize additional revenue generation of $300,000 or more per rep! In a company with only ten employees, it amounts to $3 million in yearly revenue. If you’ve purchased 100 representatives, you’re looking at an annual revenue of $300MM.

If 60 minutes of preparation time can generate $300,000 in revenue, imagine how much money your sales team is throwing away every time they can’t find the stuff they need.

I’m stumped.

Take care of the mess. Find ways to lessen the clutter – for both of you – as you work to improve your connection with your sales representatives and establish more regular, meaningful contact.

There are applications available now that can help you manage your content. Anything from Google Drive to Basecamp, Dropbox to Salesforce may be used as a digital marketing library for your content. There should be no difficulty for sales representatives accessing the materials they need whenever they need it from any location or device with an internet connection. Expertise may often be of assistance in this situation.

Make a promise to yourself and your gross sales representatives that you would only use the most current stuff available on this advertising and marketing library. Instead of relying on out-of-date materials stored elsewhere or making their own, instruct them to always utilize the most recent versions available.

The gap between sales and marketing must be bridged. Get in touch with the sales team to better understand their needs and concerns. Work collectively to higher serve your prospects. Sure, it can enhance your corporation and, in all probability, improve income. However, it can additionally enhance your office happiness, and can you put a value on that?