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| Newsletter > Discover Marketing Insights Key to Sales Growth |
Discover Marketing Insights Key to Sales Growth
| Stalled sales? Sales not meeting forecasts? Losing to competitors too often?
By arming the sales force with customer knowledge, marketing can directly impact the effectiveness of sales.
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Stalled sales? Sales not meeting forecasts? Losing to competitors too often?
When a company's sales are not meeting expectations, the first place we look is the sales force. While that is a logical starting place, it shouldn't be the only place. Lagging or stalled sales often can be revived simply by giving the sales force better marketing insights and tools.
The commonly accepted role of marketing is to raise awareness and create an interest in your product or service (collectively referred to as an "offering"). Common marketing tools include specifications, pricing, collateral materials and a competitive comparison of features.
Too often overlooked, though, is marketing's responsibility to effectively arm the sales force with customer knowledge. Doing that well requires marketing to first understand the target audience's perspective in key areas, such as:
- What is the problem that your offering will solve?
- How much value does the audience place on your offering?
- How much effort is required to implement and use your offering?
- What is the buying process for your offering?
- How does the audience believe your offering compares to your competitors?
Marketing must thoroughly understand these and other issues, because it is responsible for defining what the offering is and providing the sales force with the knowledge to sell it. Deep customer insight enables marketing to provide sales with robust information and tools that increase lead generation and boost sales conversion. Some examples include:
| Messaging |
Succinct words and phrases that clearly resonate with the audience when describing the benefits of your offering. The description of benefits must always tie back to specifically how your offering will help the person you’re talking to. Effective messaging increases the level of buyer interest. |
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| Buying process |
An explanation of the typical buying and approval processes, which will vary by offering. This insight helps the sales force ensure they involve all the necessary players and better address the entire buying process. Besides helping increase sales, this also improves sales forecasting. |
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| Scenarios |
A description of the audience’s most common problems or challenges that your offering will solve. This should include an assessment of the effort and risk that will be incurred to implement and use your offering. Such insights help the sales force overcome objections and better close the sale. |
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| Q&A |
A list of the audience’s most common questions with succinct, well-crafted answers that can be learned by the sales team. This improves sales effectiveness by ensuring that everyone involved, from executives to sales engineers, are all delivering the same messages. |
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| Competition |
An explanation of what your audience perceives to be the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Such insight provides a clearer picture over the traditional, sanitary comparison of features. Understanding the audience’s perspective improves the positioning of your offering. |
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By arming the sales force with this kind of customer knowledge, marketing can directly impact the effectiveness of sales. The key to success is getting these insights from the target audience directly, rather than relying on supposition. Marketing departments that do this effectively will help sales grow faster while increasing their company’s competitive advantage.
Chris Peters is CEO of , a Sharp Creative partner that helps clients develop and implement customer-driven marketing solutions.
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